br2-readonly-rootfs-overlay
This is a Buildroot external module that could be used as a reference design when building your own system with an overlayed root filesystem. It's created as an external module to make it easy to adapt for your to your own application.
The goal is to achieve the same functionality I have in meta-readonly-rootfs-overlay [1] but for Buildroot.
Why does this exists?
Having a read-only root file system is useful for many scenarios:
- Separate user specific changes from system configuration, and being able to find differences
- Allow factory reset, by deleting the user specific changes
- Have a fallback image in case the user specific changes made the root file system no longer bootable.
Because some data on the root file system changes on first boot or while the system is running, just mounting the complete root file system as read-only breaks many applications. There are different solutions to this problem:
- Symlinking/Bind mounting files and directories that could potentially change while the system is running to a writable partition
- Instead of having a read-only root files system, mounting a writable overlay root file system, that uses a read-only file system as its base and writes changed data to another writable partition.
To implement the first solution, the developer needs to analyse which file needs to change and then create symlinks for them. When doing factory reset, the developer needs to overwrite every file that is linked with the factory configuration, to avoid dangling symlinks/binds. While this is more work on the developer side, it might increase the security, because only files that are symlinked/bind-mounted can be changed.
This br2-external provides the second solution. Here no investigation of writable files are needed and factory reset can be done by just deleting all files or formatting the writable volume.
How does it work?
This external module makes use of Dracut [2] to create a rootfs.cpio that is embedded into the Linux kernel as an initramfs.
The initramfs mounts the base root filsystem as read-only and the read-write filesystem as the upper layer in an overlay filesystem structure.
Dependencies
The setup requires the following kernel configuration (added as fragment file in board/qemu-x86_64/linux.fragment):
CONFIG_OVERLAY_FS=y CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y
Test it out
This module will build a x86_64 target that is prepared to be emulated with qemu.
Clone this repository
1git clone https://github.com/marcusfolkesson/br2-readonly-rootfs-overlay.gitBuild
Run build.sh to make a full build.
The script is simple, it just update the Buildroot submodule and start a build:
1#!/bin/bash
2
3# Update submodules
4git submodule init
5git submodule update
6
7# Build buildroot
8cd ./buildroot
9make BR2_EXTERNAL=../ readonly-rootfs-overlay_defconfig
10makeArtifacts
The following artifacts are generated in ./buildroot/output/images/ :
- bzImage - The Linux kernel
- start-qemu.sh - script that will start qemu-system-x86_64 and emulate the whole setup
- sdcard.img - The disk image containing two partitions, one for the read-only rootfs and one for the writable upper filesystem
- rootfs.cpio - The initramfs file system that is embedded into the kernel
- rootfs.ext2 - The root filesystem image
- overlay.ext4 - Empty filsystem image used for the writable layer
Emulate in QEMU
An script to emulate the whole thing is generated in the output directory. Execute the ./buildroot/output/images/start-qemu.sh script to start the emulator.
Once the system has booted, you are able to login as root:
1Welcome to Buildroot
2buildroot login: rootAnd as you can see, the root filesystem is overlayed as it should:
1$ mount
2...
3/dev/vda1 on /media/rfs/ro type ext2 (ro,noatime,nodiratime)
4/dev/vda2 on /media/rfs/rw type ext4 (rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro)
5overlay on / type overlay (rw,relatime,lowerdir=/media/rfs/ro,upperdir=/media/rfs/rw/upperdir,workdir=/media/rfs/rw/work)
6...Kernel command line parameters
These examples are not meant to be complete. They just contain parameters that are used by the initscript of this repository. Some additional paramters might be necessary.
Example without initramfs
root=/dev/sda1 rootrw=/dev/sda2 init=/init
This cmd line starts /sbin/init with /dev/sda1 partition as the read-only rootfs and the /dev/sda2 partition as the read-write persistent state. When using this init script without an initrd, init=/init has to be set.
root=/dev/sda1 rootrw=/dev/sda2 init=/init rootinit=/bin/sh
The same as before but it now starts /bin/sh instead of /sbin/init
Details
All kernel parameters that is used to configure br2-readonly-rootfs-overlay:
- root - specifies the read-only root file system device. If this is not specified, the current rootfs is used.
- `rootfstype if support for the read-only file system is not build into the kernel, you can specify the required module name here. It will also be used in the mount command.
- rootoptions specifies the mount options of the read-only file system. Defaults to noatime,nodiratime.
- rootinit if the init parameter was used to specify this init script, rootinit can be used to overwrite the default (/sbin/init).
- rootrw specifies the read-write file system device. If this is not specified, tmpfs is used.
- rootrwfstype if support for the read-write file system is not build into the kernel, you can specify the required module name here. It will also be used in the mount command.
- rootrwoptions specifies the mount options of the read-write file system. Defaults to rw,noatime,mode=755.
- rootrwreset set to yes if you want to delete all the files in the read-write file system prior to building the overlay root files system.