Good evening, I'd like to discuss a particular problem that I've been having with my system. The basic idea I'm trying to go for is the setup of an ephemeral root, where my `/` partition is a `tmpfs`, and all directories I need to keep are linked via bind mounts to their respective locations (think /persistent/var/log bind mounted to /var/log). Originally I had set this up by simply writing all the mounts into `/etc/fstab`, but this wasn't early enough for some services and ended up losing some critical information pertaining to the boot (one example is the lack of `/etc/machine-id` making journald lose track of the system, even if all relevant logs where in a persisted `/var/log`). This forced me to move my mounting behaviour into the initrd, where i've written an initrd service that attempts to run before `initrd-root-fs.target` is reached so that all the mounts are successfully finalized before proceeding. I've also had to mark all my services with `DefaultDependencies = no` in order to prevent them from being unmounted before `switch_root` is invoked. An issue I have with this approach is that I cannot preserve any mount options associated with the respective mounts. The main option I want to preserve is `x-gvfs-hide`, as without it, the default GNOME file manager will show these mounts with an option to unmount them, and it gets visually quite annoying.
First off I'd like to ask for some advice in regards to this entire setup. While it feels perfectly stable and so far I've never had an issue with it failing or causing issues, I can't help but feel that it's a little bit brittle. In particular, I'm not totally confident that I've set up the unit dependencies as properly as I could have. Secondly, I'm not sure how to tackle the issue of preserving mount options from the initrd into the root system. I tried using `/boot` as a reference to see how systemd was able to preserve its mount options, but I realized that `/boot` mounts in the real system, and not in the initrd stage, which isn't helpful for my case. I considered possibly allowing my mounts to unmount and then re-mounting them extremely early, near `local-fs-pre.target`, but I imagined this may cause issues with journald logging possibly getting cut off due to the lack of a proper write destination, though I've actually admittedly not tried this. I'm aware this is probably a bit of a messy setup, but I'd nonetheless appreciate any advice or information that I could use to help me further refine and polish this system that I'm trying to create. Thank you for your time and consideration, Ali Rizvi (Frontear)
