3 ms·

More granular filesystems limits the blast radius of filesystem corrupting events. Hard disks used to fail pretty often, filesystems had (and still have) bugs.

More granular filesystems limits the blast radius of filesystem corrupting events. Hard disks used to fail pretty often, filesystems had (and still have) bugs. It makes sense to stick your administrative utilities needed to run/recover a given system in its own little less frequently modified filesystem vs. user applications that tend to see more churn/use in general. It's not strictly a disk space issue.

nuc1e0n 3y ago
On linux the initrd filesystem can do this IIRC
- brirec 3y ago
  Indeed most Linux distros today first boot into an initrd filesystem, mount the “real” rootfs somewhere, and then `pivot_root` to the real `/` while calling init (usually systemd) these days
  - znpy 3y ago
    An important part of passing the red hat certified system administrator (rhcsa) was to be able to recover a rhel system that was failing at booting… i got that in my exam, and i suspect that’s present in every exam session. Good times, I miss working on rhel systems.
    - brirec 3y ago
      Once you can boot “by hand” from a Grub prompt a lot of the magic starts to disappear…