2 ms·

Would it be possible to have a laptop or desktop that spends most of its time operating in such a Read-Only mode?

• majewsky 9y ago
  From what I've seen, the systemd developers are interested in going into this direction. They established /run/ as a tmpfs that is available very early during boot, and built systemd such that it never needs to write to a persistent filesystem during its operation. (It does, by default, write logs to /var/log/journal, but you can switch it to non-persistent storage at /run/log/journal instead.) Many programs can be made to work the same way. There are still plenty of programs that need to write longterm state to /var/lib, but you will probably need a writable partition anyway for /home, so you can just reuse that partition for /var/lib as well. OS updates would then be handled via an A/B partitioning scheme, where you have two copies of the system partition, and when an OS update is ready to be installed, the inactive one is mounted read-write and the update written onto it.