This is a summary of last month's thread about the feasibility of removing support for /usr on a standalone filesystem. The issue was raised by the udev upstream maintainer along with the udev package maintainers of the major distributions, who all agreed that this configuration is not supported. This is relevant for udev becase kernel events can trigger the execution of programs at the very beginning of the boot when only the root is mounted. While currently packages can and do easily implement workarounds for this situation (like waiting in a loop for the files in /usr they need to appear), in the future more complex modifications could be needed. All things considered, I have no immediate plan to push for deprecating a standalone /usr. Some of the arguments mentioned in favour of a standalone /usr are: - NFS: but it's still unclear exactly how this is managed in practice (apparently it requires much handwaving), and there are alternatives like an unionfs or really stateless clients which are probably simpler and better - junk hardware: please deal with the progress. keeping around forever old hardware "because it still works" is not green computing - backups: I know for a fact that decent backup software exists - LVM and/or RAID: no real reason nowadays to not use these for the root - mounting it read only: some people obviously like this, but it's hardly something irreplaceable - dmcrypt: not crypting /usr is just an optimization. E.g. on my laptop I decided to crypt only /home, and use symlinks for the few files in /etc which contain sensitive information, YMMV. -- ciao, Marco
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