Re: Fink 10.15 & read-only root

Thanks Scott,

I appreciate your instructions to disable SIP via ‘csrutil’, but that isn’t sufficient for 10.15 Catalina. The “system disk” is now split into a read-only root (/) and a read-write “Data” partition. So, if your system disk was “Mac HD”, there would be a read-only volume by that name and a read-write volume named “Mac HD - Data”. These appear as one in the Finder, and what appear to be writable directories at the root level (e.g. /usr/local) are tied together via a new APFS filetype called “firmlinks”. The current crop of these new links is found in /usr/share/firmlinks.

So it is more complicated than disabling SIP under 10.15. What I did find out, surprisingly, is that I could create /sw, and install Fink by first making the read-only filesystem read-write via:

sudo mount -o rw /

This was NOT supposed to continue working past the first beta, but as of 10.15b5 it still does work. After a reboot, the root filesystem is again read-only.

I look forward to continuing to work on this. My hope is that Apple will create a firmlink for /sw (they already provide /opt) so that everything will work as it did with 10.14 & earlier. There is no ability for users (even sudo/root) to make new firmlinks…

More to come!
John L.

> On Aug 18, 2019, at 15:40, Scott Hannahs via Fink-devel <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> John,
> 
> This should work, I haven’t a beta OS Cat to test.
> Boot into recovery mode ( hold down Cmd-R until Apple logo appears)
> open terminal, enter command “csrutil disable”
> Boot into regular mode, create /sw with appropriate privileges
> mkdir /sw
> chown root:wheel /sw
> chmod 0755 /sw
> Boot into recovery mode 
> open terminal, enter command “csrutil enable”
> Boot into regular mode.
> 
> There may be others, such as in recovery mode
> Open terminal
> mkdir /Volumes/MacIntosh\ HD/sw
> 	or substitute whatever your hard disk name is
> chown root:wheel /sw
> chmod 0755 /sw
> and reboot.
> 
> -Scott
> 
>> On Aug 18, 2019, at 3:25 PM, John Lillibridge <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello Fink Developers,
>> 
>> I’m a long-time Fink user, and have been building/testing under 10.15b5. There have been a few workarounds that I’d be happy to share, but I finally succeeded in getting both gcc8 & gmt5 built. However, with 10.15 there is a fundamental shift compared to all previous OS-X versions: the root filesystem (/) is read-only and will NOT allow /sw to be created. My testing thus far has used ~/sw, which is less than ideal (e.g., no bindist). My question is: is it possible to get Apple to create a ‘firmlink’ so that /sw is read-write? Has anyone come up with a more clever solution? Hoping I can help further the cause with 10.15…
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> John L.


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