[fhs-discuss] FHS/LSB Updates

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Wednesday 2011-11-23 20:12, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>> 
>>* To boot a system, enough must be present on the root partition to
>>  mount other filesystems. This includes utilities, configuration,
>>  boot loader information, and other essential start-up data. /usr,
>>  /opt, and /var are designed such that they may be located on
>>  other partitions or filesystems.
>
>Well, we're already violating that in most distributions where /boot is
>allowed to be separate.

In what way? /boot usually contains no files required after kernel
boot (only short of System.map for use with ksyslogd), since the
initramfs image is in memory already.

What was probably intended to be said what: requiring the root
partition to carry tools to mount /usr is optional if this mountpoint
was already dealt with in initramfs. But then again, one has to
consider that one may want to umount or remount /usr, or any
other volume for that matter, and therefore, the mount utility
is needed in the root fs anyway, since the initramfs is gone by that
time.

>We've already designed a requirement where, in cases where /usr may be
>separate, or not local, the initramfs must contain all the tools to properly
>mount such filesystems. At that point, the distinction of the 'root'
>filesystem being the initramfs could be a point to discuss.

I don't find FHS's wording wrong; initramfs is not something that FHS
should need to care about, ergo, "root filesystem" would also imply
mounts available prior to /.