On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Dwight Schauer <dschauer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I've been using Arch Linux for about 4 years now. I have it on a few > important systems at work and it has been doing very well. > > This morning I saw "/usr is not mounted. This is not supported." in my > boot up after a recent rc.sysinit update. > > What is this, bait and switch? I've been running Linux and BSD systems > since 1996 and typically always have /usr in a separate partition (as > well as /var, /home/ and /tmp, but lately been using a ram /tmp). > > Why does /usr even exist if it can't be on a separate partition? Why > not just combine /usr/lib and /lib? And /usr/bin and /bin? And > /usr/sbin and /sbin? Why have the distinction at all if it can't be on > separate partition? Several people already pointed out the relevant information about this, but I thought I should offer my two cents as I was responsible for the error message. The situation is currently that lots of tools break silently if /usr is not mounted at boot. In most cases you will not notice, and in the cases you do notice it is really difficult to tell what is actually going on. >From time to time we get bug reports that are really difficult to debug, and that eventually turn out to be due to a separate /usr. Once we figure out the cause, we usually end up having to say, sorry, there is nothing we can do about that, but in the meantime we have wasted a lot of time. Therefore, we really want to get the message out there that at the moment things simply don't work as they should with a separate /usr. Then people will at least know that this is a likely cause of any weird problems they experience. There are two ways to solve this: either merge your / and your /usr partitions, or make your initramfs mount /usr so init won't even know that /usr is separate. We are currently working on adding support for the second approach, but we are not there yet (I have some patches against mkinitcpio to add this, but they rely on a patch by Thomas against busybox that has not yet landed upstream). Cheers, Tom
