Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 09:20:35 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: MIKE JENKINS <jenkins.mike@epamail.epa.gov>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Writable /usr? Message-ID: <19980507092035.F396@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <s550518d.056@wpmail.gbr.epa.gov>; from MIKE JENKINS on Wed, May 06, 1998 at 12:02:04PM -0500 References: <s550518d.056@wpmail.gbr.epa.gov>
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On Wed, 6 May 1998 at 12:02:04 -0500, MIKE JENKINS wrote:
>> Date: Mon, 27 Apr 1998 20:16:02 -0400 (EDT)
>> From: CyberPeasant <djv@bedford.net>
>> Subject: Writable /usr?
>>
>> As a newcomer to FreeBSD but a greybeard in the unix world, can I
>> politely ask why FreeBSD seems intent on making /usr a writable
>> partition? In another thread, someone reports that the user guide
>> recommends locating /tmp and /var on /usr. I believe I've seen
>> recommendations to supply users' home directories in the /usr
>> partition, too. (The default installation script sets you up
>> without a /home partition.) What's the rationale for this? Isn't
>> readonly /usr (and /, if possible) a Good Thing anymore?
>
> "Installing and Operating 4.4BSD UNIX" agrees with you!
> (see /usr/share/doc/smm/01.setup/paper.ascii.gz)
>
> The reason people keep stuffing things in /usr is that
> it has plenty of space since it got the rest of the disk
> after /, swap, and /var. They probably should go back and
> resize their partitions and add new ones like /home, /tmp, etc.
Having many partitions is Evil. It increases the likelihood that you
will run out of space on one partition while having enough space on
the disk.
It's relatively easy to size read-only partitions, since they don't
change. If you want a read-only /usr (I don't, though I agree with
the reasoning for it), you can create that in the size which you want
and use the rest of the disk for /var. Under these circumstances,
though, I wouldn't make /usr a file system at all. I'd make it part
of the root file system (I think that SCO does something similar).
This would mean that the files in /usr would be available in
single-user mode, which would be a great advantage. You'll recall
that there were two reasons for originally having separate /usr and
root file systems:
1. A small root file system would be more resilient against crashes.
This would no longer be relevant if /usr were also read-only.
2. The disks were often not big enough to accomodate both / and
/usr. This is, of course, no longer the case.
Greg
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