Stretch Read Only
From embeddedTS Manuals
Debian supports running as a read only filesystem. This is useful for systems that may lose power and shut down at any time. This is the simplest way to prevent filesystem corruption.
An example /etc/fstab would include:
/dev/root / auto defaults 1 1 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0 usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0 tmpfs /run tmpfs mode=0755,nodev,nosuid,strictatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/run tmpfs mode=0755,nodev,nosuid,strictatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/volatile tmpfs defaults 0 0 tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0 tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/root is an abstraction to the real root filesystem device. This actually refers to the device u-boot specifes in the kernel cmdline as 'root='. Check "cat /proc/cmdline" to see what device this is on your system, but /dev/root can be left for these purposes.
To make Linux mount this as read only, change the mount options on /dev/root/ from "defaults" to "ro".
/dev/root / auto ro 1 1
After this, reboot. Some applications may fail to start because they are failing to write.