Hi,

The tmpfs boot mode allows one to operate a disk-less live system by
downloading a root tarball (that can be created with debootstrap) and
extracting it to a tmpfs root partition.

The tmpfs boot mode is similar to the nfs boot mode, but it does not
rely on any external service (after booting). We use this boot mode for
our compute nodes. I have attached a patch to support this boot mode and
tested it with qemu and on real hardware.

I am willing to maintain this boot mode and fix bugs in this part.

Hi Benjamin,

Please take a look at the package live-boot (and the man page of the
same name in live-boot-doc). Specifically, the parameter fetch=URL
should satisfy your requirements and consume less resources.

live-boot creates an overlay filesystem backed by a squashfs image,
which means it likely uses much less RAM than copying root to tmpfs.
(For my system, squashfs reduces the required memory to a third.)

Regards,
Peter

Hi Peter,

Am Donnerstag, den 29.06.2017, 15:55 -0400 schrieb Peter Colberg:
savings and performance penalty. Expect a patch for live-boot to
support live-{top,premount,bottom} hooks.

Some statistics: Our xz compressed root tarball is around 180 MB in
size and consumes 690 MB extracted. Our initrd uses 9 MB. The initrd
from live-boot uses 17 MB. Let's see if the live-boot initrd can be
stripped down as well.

For now, I updated my patch to add an option to enable/disable support
for the tmpfs boot mode. Updated patch is attached.