[systemd-devel] [RFC] the chopping block

[Simon McVittie]

On 11/02/16 17:06, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 5) Here's the controversial one I think: support for booting up
>    without /var. We have kludges at quite a few places because we
>    cannot access /var early during boot.

I don't think /var is really the same thing as /usr: for a start, it has
to be read/write, whereas /usr and / can be read-only for at least the
early stages of boot.

On stateless systems with a read-only / and /etc, requiring /var to be
mounted from the initramfs would mean that the mechanism for setting up
/var (NFS or tmpfs or whatever) would have to move into the initramfs.

Which specific subdirectories of /var do you want mounted before pid 1
starts? Presumably /var/lib/systemd and /var/log, and everything that's
necessary to mount those, but not necessarily their siblings?

Would it be feasible to buffer read/write stuff in /run until /var comes
up, and then write it out afterwards? (I realise that's already how some
of it works, notably the Journal.)

-- 
Simon McVittie
Collabora Ltd. <http://www.collabora.com/>