[systemd-devel] [RFC] the chopping block

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 12.02.16 17:49, Simon McVittie (simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk) wrote:

> 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.

Since initrds tend to cover root-on-nfs, root-on-iscsi and so on
anyway, that sounds like no change in behaviour really..

> 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?

Yeah, mostly those, see other mail.

> 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.)

That's what we do currently. I'd love to reduce this.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat