Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 129886
Readonly-root needs to work with HAL
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:47:17 EDT
Description of problem: Testing of the readonly-root package has so far been done before the addtion of the Hardware Abstraction Layer. There will probably be problems that arise when we try to run both. For example, the readonly-root script current set up /etc/fstab to be writable, but /etc/mtab is readonly (due to locking problems with a readonly /etc); however, I believe HAL relies on having a writable /etc/mtab This bug is here as a reminder that we need to check that the two packages work together, and fix the problems that arise.
Surely hal wants to write to fstab. Or is it running mount() at the system call level and editing mtab itself?
John and David, please can you comment on this?
Hi, hal itself isn't concerned with either mount(1) or mount(2), because hal stays out of policy. gnome-volume-manager OTOH invokes mount(1) that modifies /etc/mtab and hal does poll on /etc/mtab (using dnotify) in order to update the properties on the hal device object. So you want to make sure that /etc/mtab is on a tmpfs of some sort. Btw, there is an issue in fstab-sync (which hal invokes), insofar that the temporary file used to implement the atomic update is in /etc itself. That should be in /tmp instead. I'll make sure to change this for the next release. fstab-sync also relies on flock(2) to work on /etc/fstab. I think that's pretty much it?
I thought symlinking /etc/mtab to /proc/mounts was the accepted solution to this? Alex ?
These files are different; may break userspace apps - IIRC mount(1) expects to be able to write to /etc/mtab. Also /proc/mounts is per-process while /etc/mtab is system-wide.
I'd love to have it specifically tested and quantified with what breaks, though. :)
Changing version to correct one. (test1 -> fc3test1, and some were filed as test3 accidentally instead; but clearly must be fc3test1 given the date of filing.)
This report targets the FC3 or FC4 products, which have now been EOL'd. Could you please check that it still applies to a current Fedora release, and either update the target product or close it ? Thanks.
Fedora Core 3 and Fedora Core 4 are no longer supported. If you could retest this issue on a current release or on the latest development / test version, we would appreciate that. Otherwise, this bug will be marked as CANTFIX one month from now. Thanks for your help and for your patience.
This isn't really relevant any more.