dm-verity is a platform independent way of verifying the root filesystem at the block level, but consequently, the filesystem is read-only. So far, one of the notable issues found is pulseaudio failing because /home is read-only.
I'd always expected /home would be a separate mount point under dm-verity so that the system is actually useful.
Pulseaudio wants to write state to $HOME. So will others. You either need to have a tmpfs for state/sockets/etc (in /run or similar) which you can configure pulseaudio to use, or put $HOME in a separate read/write partition. I've also a hunch that you may be using sysv and switching to systemd will make pulse use /run, but then again there may be a hard-coded $HOME in Pulseaudio somewhere. I'm going to close this as it's too vague, as you said dm-verity works and RefKit also use it to validate the installer media. Please open specific bugs for specific issues that are not just integration issues in your system.
We're using systemd, and yes, we're already aware of the need for writeable /home. I am not aware of the refkit, is that a layer to enable dm-verity support?
refkit is a distro that targets IoT (hosted on git.yoctoproject.org). Reclosing, please file concrete bugs for concrete problems.