Re: [PATCH] SMP race in ext2 - metadata corruption.

[Richard Gooch <rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca>]

Alexander Viro writes:
> 
> 
> On Fri, 4 May 2001, Richard Gooch wrote:
> 
> > I don't bother splitting /usr off /. I gave up doing that when disc
> > became cheap. There's no point anymore. And since I have a lightweight
> 
> Yes, there is. Locality. Resistance to fs fuckups. Resistance to
> disk fuckups. Easier to restore from tape. Different tunefs optimum
> (higher inodes/blocks ratio, for one thing). Ability to keep /usr
> read-only.  Enough?

The correct solution to avoiding fs fuckups is to keep /tmp, /var and
/home separate. Basically, anything that gets written to for reasons
other than sysadmin/upgrades.

However, my point is not that it's always a bad idea to split /usr,
simply that the converse is not true. IOW, it is not true to say that
/usr *should* be split off. For a generic workstation, splitting /usr
is not useful. Importantly, it is most certainly entirely valid to
keep /usr on /.

> > distribution (500 MiB and I get X, LaTeX, emacs, compilers, netscrap
> > and a pile of other things), it makes even less sense to split /usr
> > off. Sorry, I don't have those fancy desktops. Don't need 'em. I spend
> > most of my day in emacs and xterm.
> 
> What desktops? None of that crap on my boxen either. EMACS? What EMACS?
> LaTeX is unfortunately needed (I prefer troff and AMSTeX on the TeX side).
> Netrape? No chance in hell. bash <spit> is there, but I prefer to use
> rc.
> 
> I don't see what does it have to keeping root on a separate
> filesystem, though - the reasons have nothing to bloat in /usr/bin.

In any case, my point is that splitting /usr wouldn't help, because
I'd want to preload stuff from there as well. Splitting /usr doesn't
address the problem.

				Regards,

					Richard....
Permanent: rgooch@atnf.csiro.au
Current:   rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca