Boot from Readonly USB device

[fenschop2]

Hi,

I try to boot my pogoplug from a USB stick twith a HW readonly switch. This way I hope to become more robust for power outage. I followed some internet guides on making a read-only root file system, and I can indeed boot with a readonly /. /var, /media /home are moved to a second USB stick. Also mtab and resolv.conf are symlinked to writable locations. However, the system only boots when the HW switch is in the writable mode. When it is readonly, it does not boot. I can not ping to the device.

I think that the boot process does not make it until rc.sysinit. So it might be a problem with uBoot having to deal with a HW-readonly rootfs, or early startup of the kernel.

Maybe someone has ideas on what could be the problem or how to porceed with debugging. Any help appreciated.

fenschop

[fenschop2]

Some addtional info:

I connected netconsole, and there is no difference in logging between a succesful and failed boot. In both cases the loggin ends with "Starting kernel ...".

So this narrows it down to somewhere in kernel startup and execution of rc.sysinit.

Any advice?