Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

3.1 Purpose

The contents of the root filesystem must be adequate to boot, restore, recover, and/or repair the system.
BEGIN RATIONALE

The primary concern used to balance these considerations, which favor placing many things on the root filesystem, is the goal of keeping root as small as reasonably possible. For several reasons, it is desirable to keep the root filesystem small:

Software must never create or require special files or subdirectories in the root directory. Other locations in the FHS hierarchy provide more than enough flexibility for any package.

There are several reasons why introducing a new subdirectory of the root filesystem is prohibited:


END RATIONALE


Previous: The Root Filesystem
Next: Requirements
Up: Table of Contents

Translated by troff2html v1.5 on 29 March 2002 by Daniel Quinlan