On Wed, 2005-02-09 at 19:53 -0500, Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu wrote: > Hi Everyone, > > Here's something I've had a bit of a problem figuring out. > > When someone says the "root filesystem", I automatically think of / and / is the root of all your filesystems. > everything installed on it (/root, /usr, /etc, /var and so on, excluding > of course /boot and swap) in one partition. > That is the common layout for home use. Except many also have /home as a separate filesystem/partition so data can be saved when doing a new install. > I usually setup my systems like so: > > /boot /dev/sdXX > /root /dev/sdXX > /usr /dev/sdXX > /etc /dev/sdXX > /var /dev/sdXX > /home /dev/sdXX > /tmp /dev/sdXX > > Or better yet, use LVM. > This setup _*requires*_ another partition as /. You can have as many additional partitions as desired, but MUST have /. Your list above thus requires at least 9 partitions (/ and swap are not listed). Every partition you mount is a filesystem, and all are mounted on a mount point (subdirectory) of / or below. > In this scenario, what would the root filesystem be? Everything else > that doesn't have it's own partition? Does it still refer > to /usr, /etc, /var etc., even though they reside on their own > partitions (I'm thinking it's this last one)? > > If you're wondering why I'm asking, I've been considering trying out > OpenSSI on Fedora Core 2. One of OpenSSI's neat features is it's ability > to have root filesystem failover. If the root node goes down, another > one can take over as long as that node has been setup to use the shared > root filesystem (it has to be installed on some type of network > storage). > > I've just been wondering what happens if the root filesystem is spread > across several partitions, which led me to confusing myself about what > "root filesystem" actually means. > > Thanks in advance. > > Regards, > > Ranbir > -- > Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu > Systems Aligned Inc. > www.systemsaligned.com >
