Heya, I just uploaded a new version of systemd into F15, which establishes a directory /run in the root directory. Most likely you'll sooner or later stumble over it, so here's an explanation what this is and why this is. It's a fairly minor technical change, though presumably people consider this a bigger political change, so I guess this deserves an explanation: For quite a while programs involved with early boot used to place runtime data in /dev under numerous hidden dot directories. /dev/.udev was the first one, but over time this grew to at least /dev/.mdadm, /dev/.systemd, /dev/.mount, dracut, initscripts and more tools. (Other distros have even more) The reason they used directories there is that /dev was known to be a tmpfs and available from the first instant the machine was booted. /var/run otoh is only available very late at boot, since /var might reside on a separate file system. However, /dev always has been an inappropriate and ugly place for runtime data: runtime data is not a device node, and thus simply does not belong there. Also, hiding the existance of directories from the administator is a bad idea. Then, the fact that some runtime data was placed in /var/run/xxx, and other in /dev/.yyy is often not understandable to ther user, and especially when tools originally intended to be used only after boot are needed during early boot a complicated move between these directories needed to take place. Over time different distributions experimented with different broken solutions for the early-runtime-dir problem: on Debian /lib/init/rw was introduced, a tmpfs fs mounted during early boot. On Ubuntu /var/run was mounted as tmpfs even before /var itself was mounted, with some really ugly bind mount magic. Most software however just sidestepped the issue and used /dev/.xxx. In the past weeks key people from the Debian, Suse, Ubuntu and Fedora camps (and others, too) discussed the whole issue forth and back, to find a solution to stop the misuse of /dev before it becomes even more widespread. Various solutions have been suggested, but in the end it all boiled down to the fact that /var/run does not belong beneath /var and what we really want is a top-level directory /run, and that that is the only really clean solution. The only reason why nobody dared to actually implement such a directory was unwillingness to deal with the political backlash, especially messy discussions on mailing lists like this one. Understanding this, we came to the conclusion that we should rather implement what everybody thinks is the right technical solution, instead of evading the political backlash for it. And so we implemented this. With this upload Fedora and Suse have already adopted /run now. Debian folks will suggest this for their coming release. Ubuntu has agreed with introducing /run as well. Dracut, udev and systemd have already been updated upstream to make use of /run. We expect mdadm and mount to follow suit quickly. A few years back Debian folks already suggested introduction of /run, and even pinged LSB folks about this, and back then there even was a vaguely positive response from them. So, what is implemented in F15 precisely? /run is now a tmpfs, and /var/run is bind mounted to it. /var/lock is bind mounted to /run/lock. Applications can use /run the same way as /var/run. Since the latter is FHS/LSB most apps should just use the latter, only early boot stuff should use /run, for now. The folks who have packages where this applies already have been informed. If you haven't heard from any of us, then this doesn't apply to you. So, what's the benefit of this again? - There's only one tmpfs used, backing /run, /var/lock and /var/run, reducing a bit the ever increasing amount of tmpfs' used on a default system. - All runtime data at the same place. systemd's, udev's, dracut's data are all beneath /run and /var/run now. Easily discoverable to the admin. For the first time you can see the data all these important tools used on your system store just like any other by doing "ls /var/run". - Nothing is hidden anymore. The admin can see everything beneath /var/run and /run, no hidden dot-files anymore. - We have standardized the early-runtime-dir solution across all major distributions - The people involved feel much better since they don't have to misuse /dev anymore - The lifecycle properties of directories are clear from the top-level directory name. Lifecycle properties do no longer change the further you go down your tree. i.e. /var is "persistant runtime data" and /run is "volatile runtime data", and /etc is "persistant system config data", and so on. The ugliness that /var/run abd /var/lock had completely different liftime guarantees than /var where they both reside in is gone. So, this is what is implemented for F15 now. For F16 we will make a minor change on top of this: /var/run and /var/lock will become symlinks to /run (resp /run/lock), so that we don't have to use bind mounts anymore which are not the most beautiful thing to use by default, and confusing to the admin. Due to the implications of symlinks and RPM we didn't want to make that change in F15. The actual code changes we needed to implement this scheme were trivial (basically, just bind mount /var/run and /var/lock instead of mounting two new tmpfs' to them.), which is why we opted to do this so late in the F15 cycle. However, the political implications are much bigger I guess, so let's see what a fantastic flamewar we can start with this on fedora-devel now. Flame away! Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
