Re: Just got a Pi1B. What can you actually do with it these days?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On 09 Jun 2025 10:27:35 +0100 (BST), Theo wrote:
 

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

>
There isn’t actually a need to do an fsck normally. If you were using
ext4 (or even ext3), that includes a journal. On reboot, you should see
a message “replaying journal”, after which the filesystem should be
back to a consistent state. This should be very quick, much quicker
than a filesystem integrity check.

 
I've had times where it's the FAT partition that's been corrupted, which
has resulted in a boot failure.

 
Ah, OK. FAT has no journal, of course, and being a simplistic filesystem
design originating from the 8-bit era, it is particularly prone to
corruption.
 
Does the FAT partition need to be writable, at all? It seems to me you
want to put as little stuff on there as possible.

Yes it does, because unattended-upgrades will install kernel updates there.

Ideally you want it mounted read-only the rest of the time, but that's not
what the OS does.  You could have pre-/post- apt hooks for that, but it's
getting into custom hackery territory.  Because I tend to reflash from
scratch with minimal config, I just want it to be reliable out of the box.

Theo