Introducing /run (a Filesystem Hierarchy Standard perspective).

Posted Mar 31, 2011 0:02 UTC (Thu) by rusty (guest, #26)
Parent article: Introducing /run

As coeditor for FHS 2.2 and 2.3 (the last one before the LSB included it), I thought it might be worth commenting. That was 10 years ago, so I can't speak for the FHS today.

The FHS 2.3 states "Distributions should not create new directories in the root hierarchy without extremely careful consideration of the consequences including for application portability." I think this bar has been fairly convincingly met for this case.

Note also that many of the aims of FHS, such as allowing /usr to be read only or sharing it across machines, are quaint by today's standards, and are not possible in major modern Linux distributions. But changing standards fast makes for very unhappy users, so legacy remains.

Cheers,
Rusty.
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Introducing /run (a Filesystem Hierarchy Standard perspective).

Posted Mar 31, 2011 6:26 UTC (Thu) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (1 responses)

Running ro-/usr and sharing it across systems has a new lease of life in a world of mass-virtualised environments.

Introducing /run (a Filesystem Hierarchy Standard perspective).

Posted Mar 31, 2011 8:29 UTC (Thu) by rleigh (guest, #14622) [Link]

Sharing /usr does not make sense when /usr is just one TLD out of several under the control of the package manager. Package installation and upgrading are going to be "interesting". It's also sharing the wrong thing; modern distributions allow / to be shared as easily as /usr, so you can just share the entire lot. If you so desire, you can use a unionfs/aufs overlay to make the read-only image writable.

Regards,
Roger