How to prevent linux write to a disk ?

Hi All,

My PC104 (pentium M, 1.4GHz) runs vanilla 2.6.27.35
The PC access FPGA via PCI every 3ms.
The FPGA initiates DMA (every 3ms) of data to a pre-allocated physical RAM in the PC104.

We noticed that if PC104 writes to its flash disk (from which linux boots), the data received by DMA is sometimes corrupted.
This is probably because the IDE controller is also on the same PCI bus.

The disk is divided into 2 ext3 partitions.
The first partition contains all the linux file system (boot,etc,bin,usr,tmp...)
The second partition contains the application + configuration files.

I set the first partition to read-only in the grub line.
I set the second partition to read-only using /etc/fstab

How can I prevent linux from writing to the disk ?

The application does not write to the disk at all.

Thanks,
Zvika

If your bootloader support read-only partition, you can use that.

You can try to run Linux in a ramdisk.

I am really confused. Unless you are in a live cd sort of boot, a normal linux install would try to write changes to disks.


"We noticed that if PC104 writes to its flash disk (from which linux boots), the data received by DMA is sometimes corrupted.
This is probably because the IDE controller is also on the same PCI bus. "

I'd be more inclined to think that crummy pci to flash adapter rather or some issue with dma settings for that issue.

Without your application you need to get this setup stable. Try other flash cards or other pci-card adapters or move the adapter to other slots or set bios settings slower.