On Thu, Jul 02, 2020 at 03:53:26PM +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote: > Hi, > > this is partially an outgrowth of the discussion about btrfs as > default, but makes sense independently too... > > 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://... > > Is the goal to have *everything* working? No. Some services will and > should fail. If I have a database or anything else which only makes > sense with permanent storage, failing early and loudly is appropriate. > But services which need writable storage only tangentially or not at > all should be robust and not fail. Journald behaves in a fashion where > it stores logs to /run during early boot and them flushes them to /var/log > when that becomes available. If /var/log never become available, we > have a functional logs, with journalctl showing previous and current boot > just fine. The only caveat is that logs for current boot will be lost > upon reboot. Such graceful failure should be the norm. I presume you're referring to regular Fedora here, but this description feels like it is approx asking for what Fedora Silverblue has delivered, only with the writable area for apps being just a ram disk with no persistence. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/ "Silverblue is a variant of Fedora Workstation. It looks, feels and behaves like a regular desktop operating system, and the experience is similar to what you find with using a standard Fedora Workstation. However, unlike other operating systems, Silverblue is immutable. This means that every installation is identical to every other installation of the same version. The operating system that is on disk is exactly the same from one machine to the next, and it never changes as it is used. Silverblue’s immutable design is intended to make it more stable, less prone to bugs, and easier to test and develop. Finally, Silverblue’s immutable design also makes it an excellent platform for containerized applications as well as container-based software development. In each case, applications (apps) and containers are kept separate from the host system, improving stability and reliability." Regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :| _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
