Modern linux builds apparently require /usr to be on the same partition as /. They send you to a smug and self-congradulatory web page explaining that it’s because you old farts suck.
My view is that it’s because the authors of udev and systemd are idiots who don’t know what /usr is for and ignored it, leading to unbootable systems. And then they won’t fix it because they don’t care that some people have been using that configuration for ten years.
Thanks for nothing, twerps.
Oh! I wonder if that’s what screwed up the upgrade to SuSE 12.2 on my Internet-facing server. It’s had a separate /usr partition for years, and upgrading to 12.2 screwed it up amazingly. Going back to init.d from systemd let it boot, and it’s still that way. I wonder if moving /usr to / would fix that.
Do you mean this page or some other one?
http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html
Actually, I meant this one:
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken/
The tone of that post was particularly vexing because of the “it’s been broken forever, and nobody cares” attitude. If it has been broken forever, how has my system been partitioned this way since 1998?
I will also note that openSUSE has worked around this. They have made the initrd be smart enough to mount root AND /usr. So, even if /usr is a separate partition all the tools are still present at boot time.
I don’t know if other distributions have done this.
OTOH, openSUSE has broken sysvinit so you must use systemd. I’m annoyed by this, but it’s okay because it works. When I first tried, it didn’t work at all.
I think it was the /usr problem, and I had planned on moving /usr to / before the upgrade – it’s all on LVM now so that’s pretty doable – but it worked, and laziness won and I didn’t.