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Fedora CoreOS is read-only?

CoreOS Container Linux is not. But changes are not persistent over redeployment. That's nice for quick testing and development, but of course fatal should you do it in a production system. And of course not ideal for security.

Disclaimer: Edited for false claims. Hope, it's correct now...



Go look at /usr on Container Linux, where the actual OS lives. It’s literally mounted R/O. Binaries are symlinked from there, so it’s impossible to modify OpenSSL, etc.


How is root prevented from modifying it? (Readonly mount alone is trivial to bypass)



Bit more on dm-verity as it relates to appliance and non-appliance systems. https://blog.verbum.org/2017/06/12/on-dm-verity-and-operatin...

Btrfs will support cryptographically secure hash algorithms (sha256 and blake2) starting with kernel 5.5. I wonder if this is a suitable compromise over dm-verity, which can't be updated, and more conventional file system options? When I consider various use cases, Btrfs always results in EIO rather than propagating bad data to user space; compress=zstd:1 reduces writes, saves storage space, and can improve performance of slower storage.

There's also two interesting read-only options: read-only snapshots and read-only volume (via the seed flag), root can't write to either. Root would need to unset the flag first. A read-only seed can support writes via a volatile 2nd device, e.g. /dev/zram device, reboot and you get a reset. Or persistence via a partition. Either way a reset also resets filesystem state.


The entire partition is signed so the machine will detect it




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