[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#405189: Bug#405189: initscripts: unmount /lib/init/rw after boot

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009, tech at mediaforest.net wrote:
> > And what are you going to do with the data which is in /lib/init/rw ?  Move
> > it around causing all sort of nasty races with running daemons that might be
> > using it?
> 
> The problem is that there isn't anything except dot files of zero size inside, furthermore, as mentionned in #403863, 
> those files are supected by chkrootkit to be parts of a rootkit.

Other packages may use it, and chkrootkit is just useless anyway if you're
running it from a system where a rootkit is also running.

So no, /lib/init/rw is NOT going away.  And it uses just a few kb of memory
(if that much) to keep state if you are not using it, anyway.  tmpfs is one
of the more memory-friendly filesystems in Linux, it wastes almost nothing.

Feel free to try to get programs to stop storing dotfiles in /lib/init/rw,
however.  Unlike removing /lib/init/rw or umounting it later, there is no
technical reason to use dotfiles in /lib/init/rw.  I'd rather dotfiles were
not used there, either.

-- 
  "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