> With the merged /usr directory we can offer a read-only export of the vendor supplied OS to the network, which will contain almost the entire operating system

> With the merged /usr directory we can offer a read-only export of the vendor supplied OS to the network, which will contain almost the entire operating system resources. Back in 2005 or 2006, I made a Linux that exported the filesystem this way, and it worked by mounting / as a network volume. This worked by doing a particular dance with "pivot_root" at the beginning and a union mount with a tmpfs volume. We used it to play LAN games in the computer lab. Because the network booting Linux didn't touch the local hard drive, you could clean up after yourself just by shutting down the machines. It was also nice and fast, because the machines all had gigabit ethernet and the file server was serving from cache most of the time. It ended up being noticeably better than running off local hard disk... this was the era before SSDs took over, obviously.