I noticed two Fedora 39 installations, a laptop and desktop, booting with read-only filesystems. I first noticed Nheko complaining about unable to restore keys or something wanting to send me back to login screen, then I opened terminal and encountered errors about unable to write to ~/.zsh_history due to read-only filesystem.
Cause
I don’t know. I have a suspicion of it being ro in kernel boot parameters.
(A friend group tells me that kernel should remount partitions as rw during the boot progress which doesn’t seem to happen there and suggests checking fstab (where I see nothing special) and sudo /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-remount-fs which I didn’t try due to the workarounds I document below.)
Related Issues
I didn’t find anything related on bugzilla and am unsure of whether this is related to recent grub or kernel update as the laptop was fine for some weeks before this issue started happening. I think the desktop was also fine until today morning, I upgraded it to Fedora 39 yesterday.
Workarounds
During boot in grub menu press e to edit and on the kernel boot line change ro to rw.
When / is rw, I appended rw to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX= line in /etc/default/grub and ran sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
Hi, thanks for the write-up. In order to put it into Common Issues , it really has to be a widespread problem. We also need a Bugzilla ticket to get some traction in fixing it. I’ll move the to Ask Fedora for the moment. Let’s see if this hits a large number of people, or if we can discover some major issue once it is reported and debugged in Bugzilla.
As an update, I have checked smartctl on both devices and they report:
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
So this cannot be a result of two entirely different hardware failing at once or at least there is nothing to show it was other than ro-mounting possibly being a symptom of it.
A common cause of the root file system to remain mounted in read-only mode is that it needs to be fixed by running fsck. If you don’t run fsck on that file system, and if you force it to be remounted to read-write, then any inconsistencies in the file system will likely spread to such an extent that all your date will be lost. A cause if inconsistencies can be a sudden loss of power where the operation system did not have the time to properly unmount the file system.
I don’t think that is the case, because one of the systems uses btrfs which apparently doesn’t need fscking. I have however ran it on the other just in case, there haven’t been any power issues though.