Re: / vs. /usr vs. fsck(8)
>>>>> Reinhard Tartler <siretart@debian.org> writes:
>>>>> On Mi, Okt 12, 2011 at 06:09:00 (CEST), Ivan Shmakov wrote:
[…]
> AFAIUI Harald (the fedora maintainer for their initramfs tool
> dracut), he dislikes having a separate set of tools in /usr and the
> initramfs, i.e., he strongly favors putting glibc, bash, iproute and
> similar utilities directly in the initramfs. The main motivation
> (again AFAIUI) seems to be behavioral consistency of tools between
> early userspace and the booted system.
Well, in the light of this, the original proposal now makes some
sense. Indeed, they've made their initramfs their new /, and
now wonder why would they need two /? Quite a sensible
question, as it seems. Still, I don't think that it's
applicable at all to Debian.
> On the other hand, Debian has chosen against that and relies on
> klibc, ipconfig, etc. for early userspace and thus, the initramfs. I
> suspect the main motivations behind these decisions were portability
> and size (please correct me and add references).
If anything, I'd vote for the Debian way.
And, I guess that makes Debian's initramfs and the system itself
less interdependent, to the point that one could boot a system
with a (kernel, initramfs) combination that's several revisions
behind (or ahead) of the system proper.
> I imagine it would be pretty challenging to improve the klibc based
> tools to become feature-par and sufficiently behaviorally consistent
> with their glibc based equivalents. In any case, I think having this
> in mind is relevant for deciding whether the various fsck(8)
> utilities can or should go into the initramfs or not.
I believe that should fsck(8) be moved to initramfs, there would
essentially be no reason to keep the rest of the «big stuff» off
the latter.
[…]
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FSF associate member #7257
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