A lot of this was early overflow posted ahead; I’ve been on the road.
- NetBSD 8.0 released.
- How to port your OS to EC2.
- Booting Without /usr is Broken. Another step away from history and its lessons. (via)
- “Is there a LibertyBSD community? how big is it?“
- Something blogged (on pkgsrcCon 2018)
- Valuable News – 2018/07/20.
- OPNSense 18.1.12, 18.7-rc2 released.
- A whole bunch of g2k18 hackathon reports.
- “How many desktop BSD users are there?“
- “Will NetBSD play well to being dual booted with Windows (XP)?“
- New Patreon rewards for $1 tier. Michael W. Lucas snark as fortune file, which seems like a good deal to me.
What lesson did history teach us about /usr? It was created only because the Unix folks ran out of disk on the tiny storage of the day. It’s a vestigial wart at this point.
Because having things on separate partitions is only a matter of storage space, as opposed to reliability and flexibility. Oh wait, I forgot, those are alien concepts to modern computing. My bad. Carry on.
Like Felix said, the side effect of that historical wart (which is an excellent way to describe it given the size and form of old disks) is a minimal-boot promise. Scramble the right shared library and it can render an entire computer unbootable, which is super-easy to do on Windows and I daresay possible on Linux.
The converse of that is Aaron LI’s recent initrd work, which smashes a relatively complete system into very little space on DragonFly. It is designed to make encrypted booting easier – a commendable goal – but makes the system more resilient as a side effect.
As for relearning the lessons: https://coreos.com/os/docs/latest/ or https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/server-core/what-is-server-core are arguably examples, though again as side effect.