I've just checked Slackware 14.* and it's still got a few binaries in
/bin, unlike the RedHat* group which has indeed sent them all to
/usr/bin. I don't know about the Debian* group, or if the Mandrake*
group have gone with the RedHat* or not. Let alone all the other
distros.
Wesley Parish
On 2/22/21, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Sat, 20 Feb 2021, M Douglas McIlroy wrote:
-
separation of code and data using read-only and read/write file
systems
I'll bite. How do you install code in a read-only file system? And where
does a.out go?
I once worked for a place who reckoned that /bin and /lib etc ought to be
in an EEPROM; I reckon that he was right (Penguin/OS dumps everything
under /usr/bin, for example).
My guess is that /bin is in a file system of its
own. Executables from
/letc and /lib are probably there too. On the other hand, I guess users'
personal code is still read/write.
That's how we ran our RK-05 11/40s since Ed 5... Good fun writing a DJ-11
driver from the DH-11 source; even more fun when I wrote a UT-200 driver
from the manual alone (I'm sure that "ei.c" is Out There Somewhere),
junking IanJ's driver.
The war stories that I could tell...
I agree that such an arrangement is prudent. I
don't see a way, though,
to update bin without disrupting most running programs.
Change is inevitable; the trick is to minimise the disruption.
-- Dave, who carried RK-05s all over the UNSW campus