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That's exactly how I run my daily driver, my system is read-only, and I use overlayfs to put a read-write layer on top stored in RAM. This way all changes get r
by ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
That's exactly how I run my daily driver, my system is read-only, and I use overlayfs to put a read-write layer on top stored in RAM. This way all changes get removed every time I close the computer.
For my own files I have a partition which I use exclusively for data.
When I want to make changes to the system I have a boot option to disable overlayfs which I use once every few months for updates.
- scrappyjoe 4y agoI have tried, and failed to achieve this several times. Have you written it up anywhere? If not, could you provide the basics (for _science_)?
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoI wrote a little bit about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871616
- rgoulter 4y agohttps://nixos.wiki/index.php?title=Impermanence https://nixos.wiki/index.php?title=Impermanence In the NixOS community, the idea of "reset all system state on boot" is called "impermanence".
- fragmede 4y agoDoes that mean you have to login to all your daily apps, every day?
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoIt depends, for most local apps you just have to log-in once while in upgrade mode (read-write on base system and overlayfs disabled), then the cookies will persist indefinitely and you'll be logged-in whenever you boot your computer in read-only mode. For websites the cookies tend to expire once every few months so I'll boot back to upgrade mode and refresh my log-ins everywhere at once every few months at the same time as I install my system updates. You can also selectively copy some software's local data to your persistent read-write disk partition and create a symbolic link in the original directory, that way this particular piece of software will be white-listed in a sense and always writable. But I haven't needed to do that. My only issue has been google which has a weird cookie implementation, it throws cookie-mismatch errors all the time so I have to delete them and relog-in every day. If it were a big issue I'd make my firefox profile always writable as described above but I don't use google much.
- agumonkey 4y agoAn encrypted overlayfs with fine grained remote sync would be quite neat.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoHmmmm how would the sync work with overlayfs? It sounds cool but I have a hard time picturing it. Do you mean you'd have a read-only base system, and a remote layer on top so the application data is only persisted remotely?
- agumonkey 4y agoSimply meant syncing the new data to a remote backup, so whatever happens on your immutable session doesn't impact your files.