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Date:      Tue, 11 Dec 2001 22:10:14 -0700
From:      Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>
To:        Mike Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Getting rid of /usr file system (was: Using a larger block size on large filesystems) 
Message-ID:  <200112120510.fBC5AEM33040@harmony.village.org>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 11 Dec 2001 21:09:26 PST." <200112120509.fBC59Qk07926@mass.dis.org> 
References:  <200112120509.fBC59Qk07926@mass.dis.org>  

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In message <200112120509.fBC59Qk07926@mass.dis.org> Mike Smith writes:
: > However, the argument for /usr is more than just that it is for crash
: > recovery.
: 
: It is?  Sounds like there are lots of retconned reasons that could
: equally easily be worked around. 8)

Well, small / is useful for NFS situations as well, but those can be
worked around.

: > I'd have fewer if /usr was mounted read only (which it
: > can't be for the man page issue, and other problems).
: 
: For manpages, we should be using /var/man/catman.  I'm not sure what
: other problems you're referring to; perhaps enumerating them would help?

/var/tmp sometimes is a symlink to /usr/tmp.  /usr/local gets lots of
things written to it by many packages.  /usr/src and /usr/obj present
minor problem.  I know that a few other things write to /usr, but I
don't recall them.  I remember having to move things off /usr when I
made it readonly for a real system.

Also, /var is traditionally undersized for catman.  We can fix that in
new installs, but the long dead of the past makes it a little hard to
retrofit into old systems.

: > The argument is that if / is small, the chances of it being corrupt
: > are smaller and the risk is lower of using it as an unchecked file
: > system.
: 
: The counter-argument is that making it "small" doesn't help it much,
: wheras making it "passive" (readonly) would.

Well, making it small makes it fast to recover too.

I'm not trying to be difficult, btw.  I just happen to like /,/usr
separte based on the number of problems I've had in the past making
/usr readonly on a large system.  Most can be worked around, but there
are a number of minor things that you need to find the hard way.

Warner

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