[Bug 575469] Re: recovery mode mounts filesystems read-write rather than read-only

[Stéphane Graber]

Ok, so looking at the current code, the problem is that friendly-
recovery is started after mountall mounted / as read-write, actually
everything that's in my fstab is mounted when friendly-reocvery starts.

Most of the options also require read/write access to the filesystem and
indeed need pretty much everything to be mounted (in the case where /usr
or /var are on another partition).

I can perfectly see cases where you want to drop into a shell to fix a
broken filesystem before it gets mounted or modified any further. I
don't think the current friendly-recovery is the right place to do that
though.

Ideally I'd like to see the recovery boot sequence works like this:
 - Select recovery in grub (as it's currently)
 - Start in verbose mode and without splash (as it's currently)
 - When mountall is triggered, it'll know it's in recovery mode and will trigger a first stage recovery screen asking the user if he wants to drop into a root shell or mount the filesystems. (that'd be the new part)
 - If the user chooses to let mountall mount the filesystems, then the usual friendly-recovery would start and let the user repair dpkg, make some free space, repair grub, ... (as usual)

I'd think adding this extra step to allow read/only recovery is indeed
something we need, but that's a change in a core part of the boot
sequence not to mention a UI change (as we'd get another prompt that'd
need to be translated and documented) so if we choose to go with this,
it'll have to be deferred to P (I'm happy to implement it then).

The alternative is to switch the current code to read-only, essentially
making the recovery mode bypass mountall entirely and then modifying all
the friendly-recovery scripts to trigger mountall when needed. I
wouldn't recommend doing this as it'd be a pretty significant change in
behavior and I'm not particularly fond of the idea of bypassing mountall
especially this late in the cycle.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/575469

Title:
  recovery mode mounts filesystems read-write rather than read-only

Status in “friendly-recovery” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in “friendly-recovery” source package in Oneiric:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: friendly-recovery

  In recovery mode, filesystems should probably be mounted read-only,
  since pending any problems they can safely be remounted read-write,
  while the reverse is not necessarily true.  This means that operations
  such as fsck, badblocks, zerofree, etc. are not possible without
  having to use a boot CD, and ensuring that any additional binaries are
  compatible.  One should assume that booting into recovery mode is
  either deliberate or has come about because of a problem.

  f-r 0.2.10 on lucid/2.6.32-21-generic

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