[Feature Suggestion] UsrMove continued

[David Howells]

Serge <sergemdev at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Lot of apps will break if you move /proc or /dev
> 
> Sure. And many apps would break if you move /bin to /usr/bin. But still,
> you did that? ;)

The contents of /dev vary depending on what hardware the computer has
available - which may change in real time - so it cannot be shared, so why
move it?

You would _have_ to have symlinks at /dev and /proc - so moving these gains
you nothing.  The dirents would still be present on the rootfs - so you'd've
made things less efficient by virtue of mounting these elsewhere and putting
symlinks in.  Don't forget also that symlinks are a limited resource in any
particular pathwalk (though I suspect that wouldn't actually be a problem).

> ... But an "eyecandy" kernel module can hide
> those symlinks, so user would see a nice simple layout right now, and not
> in 10 years.

Ugh.  Don't go there.  Really don't.  That's for userspace to deal with - just
like hiding files whose name begins with a ".".

> While this one (besides creating even more "Simpler and cleaner file
> system layout") has a goal: making explicit root filesystem optional
> (i.e. so small and simple that it could be replaced with initramfs).
> Which gives lots of new features, like simple diskless NFS stations,
> multiple distros on same partition, easier lightweight containers...

Which does not prevent you from leaving /dev and /proc where they are.

Actually, the UsrMove has mucked up at least one way of doing things: we
have/had RHEL customer(s) who kept /usr on AFS and were able to boot just
using the stuff in /bin and /sbin.  This is no longer a viable option with
Fedora, and presumably RHEL-7.

David