Forum - Read Only Root

Ok, first, a little background. I ended up giving my parents my first Pi for a media center. (Running XBian of course). Unfortuonately, due to unstable power sources in the house, the SD card corrupts quite often. (6 times in the past 3 weeks.) I live a hour and a half away so can't keep it reflashed and setup for them.

Today I setup xbian with an extra 100mb partition on the end of the SD card, I've got that partition mounting to /home and / mounted as readonly. Will there be any problems with this configuration? And is 100mb large enough for XBian's data? If not, what should I resize this to?

https://github.com/xbianonpi/xbian/issues/279

@belese is currently working on it.

Ok, i see that this is very similar to what @belese is doing, I will start playing with UnionFS now and see if I can contribute anything to that. Smile

Hi,
if you want, i can share my job in few days,
in some debug mode now,
but i mount the root partition in readonly, and use the aufs (same as union fs), to mount, not only the home folder, but all the root partition.

Don't know what happen with corruption, is it appear only when partition is mounted in R/W?

The corruption is where the filesystem is being written as power is removed resulting in an unknown state. in my experience, it usually results in the ext4 journal being corrupted.

@ags131, if you are a developer and/or have a fair amount of knowledge on linux, maybe you can help us with some programming and/or package maintenance?

@CurlyMo I am a developer, just not in C or C++, (I can but have almost no experience in them other than a small OS I made once in C). I mostly code in C# and do some bash scripts. I do have a good bit of Linux knowledge however.

I am willing to help if i can though. Smile

Until we have some proper documentation read this: http://forum.xbian.org/showthread.php?pid=5867#pid5867

And check this: https://github.com/xbianonpi/xbian/issues?milestone=6&page=1&state=open

And this: https://github.com/xbianonpi/xbian-config-bash/issues?state=open

One bug request is making a universal language pack with gettext as the basis. So maybe you can rewrite xbian-config-shell to make use of such language packs.

Hallo,

I do not want to start a separate thread so try to post my problem here:

I would like to mount the root in read-only mode but can not figure out how to do this correctly. I have changed my fstab but this had no effect the root is still loaded in read-write mode. I also tried to modify the init script in initramfs but this also did not work out.

I would appreciate any hint how to go on.