Beaglebone Angstrom: how to enable read only root file system

Question

I am developing applications on Beaglebone board with Angstrom Linux distro. I tend to mount root file system as read only because, it is not robust on readable/writeable configuration across power offs.

Can you make suggestions about how to mount root file system as read only? What are the steps for mounting root file system read only and then turn it back to readable/writable?

With these step i tend to get a more robust file system.

Regards

Answer 1

On a similar Angstrom-based system, I got the same "must specify the filesystem type" message. After trying a few different things, I was able to remount root as ro using: busybox mount -o remount,ro /

I have to admit I'm not certain why calling busybox directly worked when the "mount" command (which is a link to busybox) did not work, but I didn't have time to dig further.

Answer 2

You would need to edit the boot arguments that you pass to the kernel to use ro instead of rw for mounting the root file system. For example root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 ro. They are modifiable via the uboot environment variables