Putting /usr on seperate partition breaks rc scripts

Gyroplast · 2002-09-05 21:28:16

Morning.
I brought up this issue to ody on IRC, and he suggested posting it here. There you go.

First off, I like having many partitions. I usually split my HDD's up into /, /boot, /home, /usr, /var and /tmp, sometimes also /etc, to be able to mount / read-only, keep var and tmp from DOSing my filesystem when being filled up maliciously or unfortunately, and other things.

Now, having partitioned my HDD like that, I experienced a strange problem when booting the configured base system: login was "unable to determine tty", and during bootup, I got the message "/bin/sh: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" right after "INIT: starting". Sheesh, that sucks, especially because mounting all non-root file systems takes place within the rc scripts, which are obviously failing to start! The login problem is seemingly only a secondary effect.

Well, I reinstalled with /usr not being on a seperate partition, and viola, it installs and runs like a charm. Great.

That leads me to the theory that libcurses.so.5 is
- _mandantory_ for successful execution of the rc init scripts
- located beneath the /usr directory
Furthermore does it seem that
- the rc scripts fail without access to libncurses.so.5
- those scripts fail _before_ mounting /usr
This leads to the conclusion that
- you're really screwed when trying to have a seperate /usr partition
- /usr probably is not the best place for libncurses if it's needed for bootup
or alternatively that
- libncurses should not be mandantory for bootup.
Screw the neat visual effect, I want it to run!

I would like to suggest to either put libncurses into /lib, where essential system libs belong, or better yet make the rc scripts not use libncurses at all.

Any input on that issue would be greatly appreciated!

Farewell,
Dennis "Gyroplast" Herbrich

apeiro · 2002-09-06 06:03:25

Oooh, nice bug! These are the ones I never catch myself.

Gyroplast wrote:

I would like to suggest to either put libncurses into /lib, where essential system libs belong, or better yet make the rc scripts not use libncurses at all.

We'll go the first route and put libncurses in /lib. The rc scripts are written in bash, and bash requires libncurses.so to run.

Thanks again.

Gyroplast · 2002-09-06 07:54:51

apeiro wrote:

We'll go the first route and put libncurses in /lib.

Alright, so I suppose the ncurses package in the 0.4devel release will be re-released some time from now? Or do you plan on releasing a fixed ncurses for the 0.3 stable branch as well?

apeiro · 2002-09-06 18:29:41

A fix was released 10 minutes after I wrote the post above. It'll be on the mirrors tonight, and you'll get the fix with a pacman -Syu command.

Arch Linux

#1 2002-09-05 21:28:16

Putting /usr on seperate partition breaks rc scripts

#2 2002-09-06 06:03:25

Re: Putting /usr on seperate partition breaks rc scripts

#3 2002-09-06 07:54:51

Re: Putting /usr on seperate partition breaks rc scripts

#4 2002-09-06 18:29:41

Re: Putting /usr on seperate partition breaks rc scripts

Board footer