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I was involved in multiple attempts at "net-boot linux and let the local user be root", what works best is exactly what is mentioned in the article: just wipe t

by dfox 9y ago

I was involved in multiple attempts at "net-boot linux and let the local user be root", what works best is exactly what is mentioned in the article: just wipe the thing each time. But there are different approaches to this: on one extreme you can boot minimalistic linux from PXE which does moral equivalent of "curl ... >/dev/sda" on the other end you can run from ramdisk. The ramdisk approach works very well, but is neccesarily limited by size of RAM. For our anime conventions we have our own "linux distro", that consists of debian unstable with quite involved rewritten initramfs which obtains the root image from somewhere (file on USB storage, which can be optionally mounted directly, or downloads the image using HTTP) and pivot_root's into that. Being able to boot Linux on ThinkPad without any persistent storage to speak of and being able to use it completely offline (the whole infrastructure for this to happen is only on our internal LAN, not on any kind of WLAN) is somewhat magical.

deadlyllama 9y ago
These days you could solve the problem with virtualisation: boot a small ramdisk that loads KVM with GPU passthrough, and give it a block device that's an LVM snapshot or something similar that you can reset every boot. Pre-KVM, you could have used Xen with a paravirt kernel.
- jimmies 9y ago
  I just made a live Ubuntu image that fits in 300MB RAM with libvirt. I have a 5-year-old i5 computer with 8GB of RAM that I use as a Hackintosh with dedicated passthrough GPU, USB root hub, and an SSD. Having dedicated GPU and USB root hub are for performance obviously, but having a dedicated SSD means I could just pull the SSD out and plug it into a genuine Apple computer and it will work just fine. I have only two SSDs and didn't want to waste one of them to be the host OS, so I decided I would just pull another to-RAM trick to boot the host OS from a slow USB drive and put the host OS in RAM. The "abstraction layer" costed me 1GB. Just got done today, and I'm quite pleased with it. Now I have a "shell" distro that abstracts away my underlying hardware and gives me macOS regardless of what hardware I run it on. KVM/qemu are dreams come true.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jimmies 9y ago
That's right. I hope we had more time to polish it, but then it's only a couple of computers. So we were happy with the time we spent and the relative result we had. I planned to kind of doing the >/dev/sda thing and a checksum to not having to download it every time, but so little time, so much to do. For the end user - it's just some computers at the convention, a couple of computers in the lab, but I knew it felt really good to see a computer without storage pulling crazy tricks like that.

by dfox 9y ago

deadlyllama 9y ago

These days you could solve the problem with virtualisation: boot a small ramdisk that loads KVM with GPU passthrough, and give it a block device that's an LVM snapshot or something similar that you can reset every boot. Pre-KVM, you could have used Xen with a paravirt kernel.

jimmies 9y ago
I just made a live Ubuntu image that fits in 300MB RAM with libvirt. I have a 5-year-old i5 computer with 8GB of RAM that I use as a Hackintosh with dedicated passthrough GPU, USB root hub, and an SSD. Having dedicated GPU and USB root hub are for performance obviously, but having a dedicated SSD means I could just pull the SSD out and plug it into a genuine Apple computer and it will work just fine. I have only two SSDs and didn't want to waste one of them to be the host OS, so I decided I would just pull another to-RAM trick to boot the host OS from a slow USB drive and put the host OS in RAM. The "abstraction layer" costed me 1GB. Just got done today, and I'm quite pleased with it. Now I have a "shell" distro that abstracts away my underlying hardware and gives me macOS regardless of what hardware I run it on. KVM/qemu are dreams come true.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jimmies 9y ago

That's right. I hope we had more time to polish it, but then it's only a couple of computers. So we were happy with the time we spent and the relative result we had. I planned to kind of doing the >/dev/sda thing and a checksum to not having to download it every time, but so little time, so much to do. For the end user - it's just some computers at the convention, a couple of computers in the lab, but I knew it felt really good to see a computer without storage pulling crazy tricks like that.