Comment 6 for bug 1227520

Please note that with a readonly /etc and the gross "mount individual files to writable partitions" hack, there is no way to implement that in a race free manner: As that setup makes it impossible to do rename() or use symlinks, the only thing that programs like timedated or tzdata's configure could do is to truncate() the existing /etc/localtime and write the new data into it. That means that during that time (and until the write cache catches up), any program which tries to determine the current time zone will misbehave or even crash, as it can only read junk from /etc/localtime.

I highly suggest to at least change our current hack to have a writable /data/ partition and symlink files from /etc/ to that. This would at least make atomic file changes possible in /data. The best way would still be to either have a writable /etc or overlayfs/aufs on /etc, though. There are certainly other programs which want to change /etc/, and it seems our time would be better spent building overlayfs/aufs for arm than with tracking down an unknown number of programs/applications that change files in /etc?