[install-discuss] Read-Only Root FS

[Dave Miner]

> There's a lot of interesting possibilities, IMO, by creating a Read-Only Root 
> FS, and it's worth consideration as the install is being re-worked. Could be 
> out of your scope, but something to consider.
> 
> Any thoughts? Alien concept?
> 

Not alien, it's been talked about off and on for a number of years; I 
recall we had a horizontal-scaling strategy paper that some of us in 
networking worked on a few years ago which advocated doing it.

The devil, of course, is in the details, and there are a lot of them 
here.  Heck, while working on updating the Live Media project code to 
work with snv_55 I just found over the weekend that Gnome 2.16's trying 
to write font caches into a bunch of paths under /usr after initial boot 
(and doesn't work at all without it), which I don't believe even works 
with our read-only /usr for diskless clients.  God knows the Live Media 
project would be a lot easier if we already had this ;-)

I'm guessing that Caiman may propose some amounts of change to the 
system layout to make upgrades and so on easier and faster; we haven't 
gone far enough down the road yet to suggest what they might be, but I 
wasn't necessarily thinking we'd want to bite off the whole read-only 
installation thing.  I wouldn't discourage it, but depending on it seems 
unnecessary.

Dave