On Thu, Jul 02, 2020 at 03:17:58PM -0500, Brandon Nielsen wrote:
On 7/2/20 3:10 PM, Christopher Engelhard wrote:
>On 02.07.20 17:53, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
>>It would be great if we could fairly reliably boot with a read-only
>>root file system, all the way to the graphical environment. Obviously,
>>such a machine will not be fully functional, but for users, debugging a
>>disk problem when they have the normal environment with windows,
>>tabbed terminals, graphical editors, and internet is vastly easier.
>>
>>It also creates an image of robustness. Imagine that instead of being
>>rudely dropped to a terminal prompt, the user is instead able to log in
>>as usual and see a popup like
>>>Your home directory is read-only. Do this and that. See https://...
>
>That would be fantastic, and would be miles ahead from any UX I had on
>any computer, ever.
>
>>I hope we can all cooperate to make read-only boots nicely robust and
>>functional. Please play with this and report bugs. I'll try to solve any
>>that relate to systemd. The systemd version with udev.blockdev-read-only
>>is not released yet, but is available from koji ci builds [11].
>
>Thanks for working on this, I will definitely give it a try myself.
>
>Christopher
This sounds excellent!
Could we somehow provide a list of links that may be helpful to
recover from certain common failures? Maybe in a MOTD?
Ubuntu's MOTD are well known and people seem to like them a
lot. Fedora hasn't been making that much use of them. But I think we
should in general.
If we switch to btrfs by default, we'll certainly need to beef up the
docs about diagnosis and recovery. If MOTD poped up a link to them if
there are any fs-related issues in the initial boot would be pretty
nifty.
Zbyszek