[oi-dev] Desktop Illumos Still Matters

Jim Klimov jimklimov at cos.ru
Wed Sep 5 09:18:37 UTC 2012


2012-09-04 22:25, Andrew M. Hettinger пишет:
> was kept in /bin and /sbin that did not depend on anything. This was
> done to allow you to NFS mount everything else. IIRC the decision was
> made to go ahead and make them dynamicly linked because noone NFS mounts
> them anymore anyway, and it meant we had to keep both a simplified and
> full version of the programs. I think this will encounter many similar
> issues as that. If we are going back down this road, we could consider
> just delivering a /bin and /sbin we can use as you propose. It would
> have the advantage of bringing back this lost (albit rarely used)
> functionality.
>

Well, as a little offtopic from desktopness, I have long ago posted an
illumos RFE 829 to (again) support separatable "/usr" datasets, allowing
one to compress much of the rootfs among other benefits of hierarchical
environment (quotas, different storage and stuff).

I've recently redone this on my laptop with no problems, following my
own logs on wiki and bugtracker; the only substantial blocker was and is
the "/sbin/sh" being a symlink to "../usr/bin/ksh" or somesuch. System
fails to boot itself when /usr is separate. Replacing this symlink with
a hard copy of /usr/bin/bash (as /sbin/sh) does not break the system as
much as I can see (several machines doing this for several months now)
and allows to split /usr off into its own compressed dataset.

There were some other nuances discussed in the RFE, like additions to
the SMF service which mounts minimal root environment, and problems
with beadm/zfsclone not setting compression attributes on clones,
but I won't bother you here with those ;)

I just wanted to stress that this is not a feature only useful for
diskless NFS boots, but also on a PC or a laptop or a VM, especially
with limited HDD or SSD space and/or IOPS/bandwidth (less reads =
faster boots).

//Jim Klimov




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