Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
I do believe you've missed the point. Splitting /usr from / helps in a teeny percentage of cases, and most of the cases where it "helps" that have been mentioned here, it actually doesn't.
Well, I think it helps in the case of network mounting it; it is easier to mount a non-root FS than the root fs. Given this isn't a huge benefit, and isn't for a huge number of people either.
Personally, I don't have /usr on a different partition on any machine. No need for it.
Yet, splitting /usr/lib, which is grotesquely huge and hard to deal with, is treated as an impossible thing, needing a great level of proof before it can be considered. This is very foolish.
Well, I didn't ask for great levels of proof. I asked for /any/ proof. The /usr split has already been done; it'd be more work to re-merge /usr and / than it would be to leave it the way it is. The same can't be said for libexec.
We've been told that /usr is necessary to allow network sharing. Of course, you can network share any directory, not just /usr. If you want executables to be shared, then share /bin. It's not a problem. I've done it.
Sharing the root fs is possible via special kernel support or via initrd. /bin I guess is doable alone, but would require some nice initrd hacking.
We've been told that /usr is necessary because then you reduce the chance that the system will be hosed from disk corruption.
This is, of course, BS; use a journaled file system for that. Either that, or make /home, /tmp, /var, etc. separate and then / will hardly ever be dirty, so it won't suffer corruption. You could even mount it ro.