[LEDE-DEV] persistent /var (or /data)?

[Daniel Golle]

Hi!

Please share your thoughts on a rather trivial but yet important
issue I'm currently facing:
/var happends to be a symlink to /tmp which makes sense on small
flash-based systems. For some applications it may be feasible to also
offer some convention on where to mount a persistent storage volume.
Think of collectd, postgresql or even syslog data surviving reboot if
a suitable storage option exists.
At first I thought it could be as easy as removing the /var symlink
and mounting something else where instead -- however, it seems that
the assumption that /var == /tmp held true for too long to allow that
kind of change to be trouble-free.

On Android and other embedded systems, this whole issue is solved by
having a designated volume mounted on /data, usually backed by a
partition on an sdcard or the like.

Similarly, on systems with block or large (SLC!) NAND storage we
could introduce an additional partition/volume mounted on /data and
just not have that directory on systems without any storage options.

Any ideas? Objections?


Cheers


Daniel