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

[Stéphane Graber]

Yes it's quite a few changes to introduce pretty late in the cycle, the main reason though is getting recovery mode to actually act like one.
What we currently have basically shows you friendly-recovery at the end of the boot sequence when most of your services are already running and file systems are already mounted. I think we definitely need to fix that to make our recovery boot useful.

The renaming from single to recovery is needed to avoid additional changes into upstart, I think it's a good idea to split actual "single user mode" and "recovery mode". This essentially gives us:
 - when booting with "single" only => start some services + sysvinit scripts for runlevel S and give the user a root shell
 - when booting with "recovery" only => start friendly-recovery with a read-only filesystem, on resume, just continue a regular boot sequence
 - when booting with "single" and "recovery" => start friendly-recovery, on resume continue in single mode and give the user a root shell

I think this makes sense and the changes to grub and upstart are really limited and I think are pretty safe.
The changes to friendly-recovery itself are quite substantial to implement the read-only mode and switch to read/write but it's very localized change that affects only friendly-recovery and that I think can't get us a worse experience than what we had in the past.

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Title:
  [UIFe] [FFe] recovery mode mounts filesystems read-write rather than
  read-only

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

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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