> 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
