BBS:      TELESC.NET.BR
Assunto:  Re: Adding a hardware swap partition
De:       Richard Kettlewell
Data:     Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:54:11 +0000
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bp@www.zefox.net writes:
> It was a surprise to learn that a single partition is somehow required
> for RasPiOS to function correctly. If true, it's a good thing to know.

Separate /usr probably still works, but I doubt it gets much testing.

It?s really not going to make swapping significantly faster. Nor is
trying to find an optimal location for swap - you have quite possibly
already spent more time on the matter in this thread than you could ever
possibly save.

>> Back in the good old days there were enough programs in /bin (which
>> was an actual directory, not a link to /usr/bin) to recover a system
>> with disk errors (when possible, anyway).  But now that /bin is a
>> link, I wonder if the system will even boot properly, since "user
>> space" would have to mount /usr before almost all (all?) programs are
>> available.  Including systemd.
>
> Given that RasPiOS has an /sbin directory, I'm pretty sure the machine
> will come up at worst in single-user if /usr can't be mounted
> normally.

$ ls -ld /sbin
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Nov 17  2023 /sbin -> usr/sbin

However I believe this is neither here nor there since initramfs is
responsible for mounting /usr if it?s separate. If it fails to mount you
will most likely end up in an initramfs shell (which is a pretty
reasonable recovery environment).

> Whether /home/, /var/ and  /tmp/  can be links to /usr is less clear to 
> me at this point. 

You might run into trouble with AppArmor. Not particularly hard to fix.


If all this is about adding some swap space then you are massively
overcomplicating matters. If there?s no unpartitioned space left then
just create a swapfile and get on with your life. If you do anything
more complicated than that then make sure your backups are up to date
first.

-- 
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.13
 * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

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