[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Re: Early writable filesystem

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Thomas Hood wrote:
>   * Mount /var/run and /var/lock as tmpfs to avoid race conditions with
>     needing writable places during boot, we'll ensure anything needing a
>     subdir doesn't assume that it exists first.
>   * Make sure that we don't clobber those mounts if we /var is a separate
>     filesystem
> 
> Despite what is written here, I don't see any code that preserves /var/run
> if /var is mounted by mountnfs.  Also, what motivates an early writable
> filesystem is not a "race condition"; so it is questionable whether the
> Ubuntu developer has fully understood the issue.  Of course, Ubuntu still
> gains one thing: /var/run and /var/lock no longer have to be cleaned.

Hah, but now they have to fix all initscripts that do not take that into
account.  Not a wise move to take by themselves, as we are clearly going to
go that way too sooner or later.

> Also, they have introduced a new initscript called "mtab", split out of mountvirtfs,
> which just updates the mtab file.
> 
> I am not intending to backport these changes.

Agreed.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh