From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Oct 24 10:44:10 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id KAA09099 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:44:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA09078 for ; Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:44:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id KAA12286; Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:41:12 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199610241741.KAA12286@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: root only: (was Re: comments on this change please.) To: sja@tekla.fi (Sakari Jalovaara) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:41:12 -0700 (MST) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <9610241636.AA18058@poveri.tekla.fi> from "Sakari Jalovaara" at Oct 24, 96 07:36:12 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > If I understand correctly, the main reason for wanting a read-only > root partition is that then we'd have a not-easily-corrupted partition > for booting. Well, my personal reason is so that I can burn a CDROM that boots, mounts the CDROM as root, mounts an mfs as /var, and asks some questions about the machine configuration to come up with a completely functional machine. A secondary reason is the ability to export a single system root for all NFS clients in a multiple client diskless/dataless configuration. A tertiary reason is to secure an NFS exported / against change. Other people have mentioned other reasons. Like the ability to place the majority of the OS in a ROM for an embedded system, or in a cartridge for a game machine (I know; this last assumes a port to another processor). > Instead of moving most of /etc out of /etc, how about approaching the > "problem" by trying to pick the set of files that are needed for > booting before mounting /usr. This includes any file having to do with networking in the NFS client case. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.