overlayroot not working as expected

[Mohamed Belhassen]

Hello,

I have enabled overlayroot using "armbian-config" command line tool (in my orangepi PC).

My current OS is Armbian Focal xfce desktop

After rebooting, I noticed that the entire filesystem stills writable.

I checked the content of ( /etc/overlayroot.conf) using; 

 cat /etc/overlayroot.conf

this command show at the end of the file these two lines: (after commented content):

overlayroot_cfgdisk="disabled"
overlayroot="tmpfs"

 

If I well understood, normally, with such a configuration, the filesystem should be set to read only., but in practice, it is not.

 

Could you assist me how to resolve this problem?

 

[Igor]

50 minutes ago, Mohamed Belhassen said:

Could you assist me how to resolve this problem?

What about little research first?
https://www.google.com/search?q=overalyroot

[HamAndChris]

Seriously? You think that is an appropriate response to someone asking for help? You are not Linus Torvalds, and even he has acknowledged you shouldn't treat people like this. I see your responses to other questions are just as hostile, and you're making this forum a toxic and repellent place for newcomers who need help getting started. If you don't plan on helping anybody why are you posting here just to make them feel bad?

 

A more useful response would have been "This feature is not fully developed, so it might not work as it says. Take a look at this other post for some guidance on troubleshooting", with a link and an apology for the tone you also used in that post.

 

Is that honestly so hard? Literally saying nothing would have been better than a snarky condescending link to Google. Get over yourself.

[Igor]

22 hours ago, HamAndChris said:

Seriously?

If you have bisected my previous replies you would also notice one important information: "we are running with 1/1000 of needed resources". But since you only care about yourself and how to abuse this service to solve your expensive technical case without helping us, you didn't.

 

Also laziness is something I don't support and have no intention to hide that. If you are lazy and seek for my attention it is your gamble to be treated bad. Have you ever thought this might be taken as an insult?

 

22 hours ago, HamAndChris said:

you shouldn't treat people like this

 

This is not a commercial support service and you are not a client. We pay for this support and it is our gift to you. 99% of questions on this forum has nothing to do with our work so it has no moral relationship to give you support. And in best effort manner. This is my best effort. I don't have time for a betrer one.
 

Sadly support burden is extreme, while you totally don't care about that. Why should we care? I was very polite and professional in the past, just to see if that change anything. You were more satisfied, absolutely, but the negative impact on our side was even more extreme and I could get insane spending too much time "with my clients" that just takes and give nothing and are even spreading BS like you do.
 

Your duty is that people that helps (we) feel alright. Not the other way around.

 

• you have to be careful not to waste our time, attention and stress us out by asking questions which were already asked on our expense,
• you have to be careful not to waste our time, attention and stress us out by asking questions that has nothing to do with our work on our expense,
• you have to be careful not to waste our time, attention and stress us out by asking questions without supplying any logs on our expense,
• you have to be careful not to waste our time, attention and stress us out by demanding support on our expense,
• you have to be careful not to demand from us to fix something for you on our expense,
• you have to be careful not to demand from us to develop something for you on our expense,
• you have to be careful not to open stupid replies like this since its your attitude that has to be changed,
• you don't insult and stress us with your unnecessary questions,
• you have to check if you can help us prior to asking for help on our expense,
• you can get at a subscription to show you are not yet another gift abuser on our expense.

 

Check forum rules for more. We invest a lot of our time to provide you a ground for communication without insulting us, but you never read it since you don't care. Its all about your problem. Which I totally don't care about - if that is my personal expense daling with - if you pay, I will make an exception. I only care about our common problems. Once we rule them out, many people can't complain about them anymore ....

 

22 hours ago, HamAndChris said:

and an apology

After you.

 

22 hours ago, HamAndChris said:

 

Is that honestly so hard?

 

Providing polite answer is extremly time consuming (i lost 100 EUR for this polite answer too you and I am sure you will never pay me back) and it can create us much more damage then short answer like this one - with a valuable hint. I don't have intention to chat or make "friendship" with my "clients". 365 day in a year * +10 hours is something I could easily lost if going the suicidal route you recommend. I tried that, but the negative impact is too extreme.

 

Get some reality touch before giving advices.

[balbes150]

@IgorThere is no point in wasting time on characters who think only of themselves.

[HamAndChris]

Yes I only think of myself, that's why I am calling out the toxic hostility that pushes people out of the open source community.

 

If resources are a problem, maybe you should spend less time belittling people and getting defensive about it. It literally takes *less time* to be polite. You could have just said "This feature might not be working, start with google and let us know if you find a solution". It might even make more people inclined to help the project, a.k.a. donate resources.

 

Anyway I solved this guy's problem and I'm going to post the solution here because I'm so selfish.

 

After reading through the overlayroot github documentation, I found there were a few things missing after selecting the 'Enable Overlayroot' Armbian option:

1. Add 'overlay' to "/etc/initramfs-tools/modules" file

2. "sudo apt install busybox-static"

3. Copy these two files where they belong (downloaded with "git clone https://github.com/chesty/overlayroot.git"):

   1. sudo cp hooks-overlay /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/

   2. sudo cp init-bottom-overlay /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-bottom

Then I rebooted and the root filesystem is successfully overlayed.

[Igor]

30 minutes ago, HamAndChris said:

out of the open source community.

Stop abusing open source communities and they won't be hostile to you.

 

49 minutes ago, HamAndChris said:

If resources are a problem, maybe you should spend less time

You also want to control my personal time? Amazing.

 

31 minutes ago, HamAndChris said:

It might even make more people inclined to help the project, a.k.a. donate resources.

 

You know this because? 

 

In all history of the project, donations in best times never covered 0.5% of the costs you create.

 

With another words - donations are totally irrelevant in whole and especially when we came to the question of supporting you. One single question, could easily create 500, 5000 or more EUR costs, this one today created only 200 EUR and I expect that you will cover those damages. This is your debt to this project. And you just showed up.

 

Support under your conditions for optional donation - in your dreams.

[Igor]

1 hour ago, HamAndChris said:

You could have just said "This feature might not be working, start with google and let us know if you find a solution". It might even make more people inclined to help the project, a.k.a. donate resources.

 

FYI. I made many experiments to be able to handle support questions with absence of little to no reward and no cost coverage.

When reply is positive and optimistic, experiments shows that people only stop asking questions when they get "all" answers to "all" problems they have. Its like a full blown consulting / blood sucking service from many areas and off topic. When reply is cold, direct or impolite, they don't ask more questions. This tactic saves insane a lot of my precious time and provide enough room to help with hints. Only sometimes I bump into people that want to discuss about that. Again on my expense.

[HamAndChris]

By donate resources I meant time. E.g. help out with debugging, contribute code, answer questions for newbies on the forums. You know, all the things that would help alleviate your resource strain, and that people will *definitely not do* if they are personally attacked for asking questions about an *actually broken feature*.

 

Being hostile to people so they "stop asking questions" is insane. How many people have you scared off with this tactic, who might have ended up helping others or contributing to the project? Where do you think new contributors come from? The name of this forum is literally "peer to peer technical support" but I don't see any peers supporting each other, just people getting yelled at by you and then never coming back.

Anyway I'm not going to change your attitude, but maybe someday you'll realize that carrying this cross and spitting on people is just making the cross heavier.

[Igor]

 

46 minutes ago, HamAndChris said:

if they are personally attacked for asking questions about an *actually broken feature*.

Even the feature is broken, you have absolutely no rights to waste our time by insisting that its our problem. This is fundamental principle of FOSS projects. Its quite common that people demands we fix this and that feature that is not working. Fixing some feature really costs insane time and money. Its not possible to fix. I told them nice 1st, but they  usually insist it's our job (to waste 20 - 50.000 EUR of our private money to fix feature that is not working for them (example) - talking in general, not for this script from this topic) ... it doesn't work that way and If that person never came back, I am totally fine.

[cuker]

23 hours ago, Igor said:

they  usually insist it's our job (to waste 20 - 50.000 EUR of our private money to fix feature

50.000 € ? How did you get such amount?

[Igor]

58 minutes ago, cuker said:

50.000 € ? How did you get such amount?

 

I assume you know how to estimate project costs in (embedded) software development? Then invest a day or as much as necessary, analyze all feature requests and count market prices since nobody will donate time. ("Just") make X board stable is easily this number or much more, adding X board can be 3-4 times this number if there is weird architecture and little to no community activity, developing / porting some driver can eat weeks of a devs team if not very complicated, depending of the current support, but you can find some projects which can be estimated easier. If you have this know-how. For a joke I have recorder how much we wasted just for dealing with one board wifi problem - infamous xradio r&d and never ending river of users questions on all possible channels ... I stop estimating time we waste at 20.000 EUR ... engineering hour in EU is 20-60 EUR, support hour a bit less or much more. Depending on situation and necessity. And no organisation can run solo on developers ...

[cuker]

That's ridiculous! One wifi problem for 20.000 €   For such amount I would just use different board. And you spend such amount for some user request? Sure, sure ...

And as I wrote already before: stop supporting users and start support only real customers which pay for the work. But maybe there are not much of them so the calculation would fail?

 

I think I should start calculating how much time (and consecutive money) I'm spending for free work.

[Igor]

3 minutes ago, cuker said:

That's ridiculous!

I agree. But this is how development looks like sometimes.

 

5 minutes ago, cuker said:

stop supporting users and start support only real customers which pay for the work.

 

I don't mind supporting amateurs for free but its probably not possible to distinguish and count on users honesty. Its can't fail since time is wasted in any case. If answering stupid or repeating nonsense, educating users to actually understand that we are helping them this and that way ... and that at the end all this is our cost, which is not small.

 

9 minutes ago, cuker said:

I think I should start calculating how much time (and consecutive money) I'm spending for free work.

If you are doing this occasionally, its not a problem and IMO not needed to deal with this question. If this is almost or more then a full time job in term of time ... 

The project we are running here is a lot of work every day. I am sometimes more, sometime less, but I can estimated somewhere between 4-10 hours on this project every day. Others are a bit less, some here and there, but in total it's quite a big number.

[cuker]

I can't figure out if Armbian is hobby project or commercial? I mean if you spend so much time on it that your life depends on it then it can't be just hobby. But then you need solid financial income every month. But seems this is not happening and that's why we can read so many times how every feature costs money. Which is stupid actions. Do things what you can and leave other issues unresolved. It's that easy. If some customer pay for some feature this is different story.

[Igor]

 

5 hours ago, cuker said:

I can't figure out if Armbian is hobby project or commercial?

 

If project would be commercial, we would not develop anything or just pretend to have development, experts would not provide free support, but you will get yet another repack what is available sold as "the best linux" to you. This is most common pattern in Linux world. On top of that, we would (need to) sell your personal data.

 

Commercial project must create profit. That is that part of the money, that is left when you pay all of the expenses. Public share in expenses is less than 0.5%. 

Why would that matters anyway? Even this is our hobby, you are not in a position to waste our private time. Those are basic human relations - if you ask for help and even dare to ask for free services, how can you expect that this is our expense? I really have hard time to understand why you expect any answer, while you give nothing. Lets exclude smaller part of this community that actually contribute to the open source, makes occasional donation or adds their own resources.

 

5 hours ago, cuker said:

why we can read so many times how every feature costs money

 

Because you obviously don't know that. If they are free, just get them where they are free. If they are not free, they costs something. Usually time & money, but your contribution is also as good, sometimes better than money.

 

5 hours ago, cuker said:

Do things what you can and leave other issues unresolved. It's that easy.

Until pleads are addressed on us and until you will be rude enough to use private channels to report troubles you have with a publicly available software, we haven't even develop in large part, but its a work of community at large, you might get such response. We can say this is just an education / informing part of our work.

 

5 hours ago, cuker said:

If some customer pay for some feature this is different story.

Just cover the time you / customer / vendor waste and things you have. We are not seeking for more job ... yeah, non-commercial relationship is a bitch. You don't need to give anything, but I also don't need to be professional or apologize for being an ass sometimes.

 

5 hours ago, cuker said:

But then you need solid financial income every month.

I have a solid financial income, which is why I can afford to sponsor a lot of work in community behalf, but I am not interested to enhance my donation to OSS sw and start hiring people to make more work in your / vendors & competition interest. That's your job to cover - if you want to have a bug fixed, feature developed.

[cuker]

Sorry but what you are writing has no sense. And you don't know where to place this project. It is not commercial and it is not for basic users. Maybe it is only for advanced users

 

Seems you need some sort of ignore button on yourself.

 

Anyway, less hostility would be welcome here.

[Igor]

17 hours ago, cuker said:

Anyway, less hostility would be welcome here.

 

Agree. Start working on to imrove your communication, play by the rules we set to not waste our time in such a great extend ...

When users have a problem, users transfer in uncontrollable blood sucking beast towards people that contribute. How about that perspecitve, which is not seen if you only think about your small self / problem? Read again:
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16469-overlayroot-not-working-as-expected/?do=findComment&comment=125163

 

 

17 hours ago, cuker said:

Maybe it is only for advanced users

Maybe world is not black and white.

[cuker]

7 hours ago, Igor said:

Start working on to improve your communication, play by the rules we set to not waste our time in such a great extend ...

Users will never behave better. Until you will realize that you will live with same problem.

 

And what about ignoring requests from users which are not possible to solve? No need to be always rude with response. No response in such case is better.

[ValdikSS]

13.12.2020 в 18:07, Mohamed Belhassen сказал:

I have enabled overlayroot using "armbian-config" command line tool (in my orangepi PC).

After rebooting, I noticed that the entire filesystem stills writable.

 

There's a small bug in overlayroot package: it requires grep to be in initramfs, but by default it is not included.

To fix this, you need:

1. Install busybox-static:

apt install busybox-static

 

2. Enable busybox in initramfs:

set

BUSYBOX=y

in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf
 

3. Regenerate initramfs:

update-initramfs -c -k all

 

Now it should work.

 

P.S. the logs of overlayfs is in /run/initramfs/overlayroot.log