RHEL7 might feature /UsrMove

[redman]

When looking for something different, I stumbled upon an article on Fedora 17 which featured /UsrMove, a reoganisation of certain directories into /usr:

QUOTE

Historically /bin, /sbin, /lib had the purpose to contain the utilities to mount /usr. This role can now be taken by the initramfs. Because the initramfs knows, where to find the root partition (which includes /etc), it can parse /etc/fstab and other configuration files and mount /usr before it finally switches the root partition and executes /usr/bin/init. From this point on init mounts the remaining partitions in /etc/fstab and the system starts as usual. The long-term plan is to clean up the mess and confusion the current split of / vs. /usr has created. All tools will move back to /usr where they belong, and the rootfs will only contain compat-symlinks into /usr. Almost the entire system installed by packages will reside in /usr. This will split all non-host specific data to /usr. /usr can then be seen as the Unix System Resources partition (/System), which defines the base operating system (e.g. F18 or RHEL-7). This new /usr could be mounted read-only by default, while the rootfs is read-write and contains only empty mount points, compat-symlinks to /usr and the host-specific data like /etc, /root, /srv. Compared to today's setups, the rootfs will be very small. The new /usr could also easily be shared read-only across several systems, and it would contain almost the entire system. Such setups are more efficient, can optionally provide a lot more security, are more flexible, provide more sane options for custom setups, and are much simpler to setup and maintain.

When exploring this a bit futher, I came across several references that RHEL7 might be featuring this.
If so, I can imagine this to be an interesting case for sysadmins using any version of Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS, SL etc.).

LInks to relevant articles about this:
What's new in Fedora 17 on h-online.com
Fedora Wiki on /UsrMove
Various notes on /usr unification on lwn.net

[joutlan]

Thanks Patrick! I'm really really looking forward to SL7!