BBS:      TELESC.NET.BR
Assunto:  Re: Adding a hardware swap partition
De:       Theo
Data:     Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:01:36 +0000
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Lawrence D?Oliveiro  wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:04:10 -0300, Jim Diamond wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> There was this conventional separation into two levels:
> 
> Absolutely core, indispensable stuff:
> 
>     /bin
>     /lib
>     /sbin
> 
> Somewhat less important stuff:
> 
>     /usr/bin
>     /usr/lib
>     /usr/sbin
> 
> The core point being that things in the first group had no
> dependencies on things in the second group. So, for example, there
> would be no executable in /bin or /sbin that depended on a shared
> library in /usr/lib. But everything could safely depend on things in
> the first group, since pretty much by definition, you wouldn?t have a
> functional system without that.

It was also that you could then make /usr an NFS share, to be shared by all
the computers on the network.  /bin /lib etc would be local to the machine
(perhaps in ROM, on a small HDD or even on floppy) which was just enough to
connect to the network, mount the NFS and load all the real stuff from /usr
over the network.  If the NFS mount failed for some reason, you still had
some local tools to fix problems.

Of course network boot has moved on a lot since then.

Theo

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

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