Red Hat Fedora Project plan to change the Linux Filesystem location

Provide a simple way of mounting almost the entire installed operating system read-only, atomically snapshot it, or share it between multiple hosts to save maintenance and space. Instead of spreading RPM package content all over the place in the filesystem, and artificially separate /bin from /usr/bin and /lib from /usr/lib, move all content to /usr and provide only symlinks in the root filesystem.

/usr on its own filesystem provides a lot of valuable options in custom setups. For historic reasons, we split-off more and more tools from /usr and put them in /. But, advanced features in today's systems can not really bootup with an empty /usr anymore. More and more fails in subtle ways in such setups.

Instead of moving more tools to /, we today already require /usr to be mounted from inside the initramfs, to be available before the real 'init' starts. The split of the root filesystem an /usr serves no purpose in Linux anymore and only complicates or prevents simple and more flexible setups.

This leaves us with the following well-defined directories, which compose the base of the system:

• /usr - installed system; shareable; possibly read-only
• /etc - config data; non-shareable
• /var - persistent data; non-shareable;
• /run - volatile data; non-shareable; mandatory tmpfs filesystem

In the process of moving /bin and /sbin to /usr/bin, /usr/sbin can be moved also to /usr/bin.

/

|-- etc

|-- usr

| |-- bin

| |-- lib

| `-- lib64

|-- run

|-- var

|-- bin -> usr/bin

|-- sbin -> usr/bin

|-- lib -> usr/lib

`-- lib64 -> usr/lib64