Bug 19508 – Even in single-user mode /usr cannot be unmounted

• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Marc Ballarin 2003-04-17 17:17:59 UTC]

Under Gentoo, it's not possible to unmount the /usr filesystem. The reason is,
that bash always uses the following files in /usr, keeping the filesystem busy:

/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
/usr/lib/gconv/gconv-modules.cache
/usr/lib/gconv/ISO8859-15.so (or similiar)

All these files are part of glibc.  While /usr/lib/gconv has a size of ~4.5M and
could easily fit in the root filesystem, locale-archive is over 18M in size.
It seems, that bash doesn't need gconv to run, since it works when I remove /usr
from fstab and reboot with the "single" option.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.You need to have /usr on a separate partition/device
2. Switch to single user mode
3. try to umount /usr

Actual Results:  
umount: /usr: device is busy

Expected Results:  
/usr should have been unmounted

[Comment 1 Martin Schlemmer (RETIRED) 2003-04-21 15:53:00 UTC]

Use sash ?

[Comment 2 Martin Schlemmer (RETIRED) 2003-04-27 21:41:15 UTC]

Another alternative might be to compile bash without nls support.  I
however do not know if this is an idea that will be appreciated by all
users.

[Comment 3 Martin Schlemmer (RETIRED) 2003-08-03 06:53:26 UTC]

Moving /usr/lib/gconf is not a good idea i think.