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Another approach I miss from SmartOS. It boots from a USB stick, loads system to a RAM disk, mounts configuration from a directory, and then hosts VM zones fro
by jmbwell 4y ago
Another approach I miss from SmartOS.
It boots from a USB stick, loads system to a RAM disk, mounts configuration from a directory, and then hosts VM zones from ZFS datasets. The “root” system remains immutable.
To patch or upgrade, you just write a new system image to the USB stick and reboot. It’s great.
To skip the USB stick, you can do the whole thing over PXE.
After running a cluster on SmartOS for many years, moving back to Linux and installing the OS feels fragile, dirty, and weird.
- nortonham 4y agoI only learned about smartos recently, after using openindiana and learning about illumos based systems. SmartOS is a really neat idea; I'm surprised it's not more popular
- m463 4y agoreminds me of a slightly different scenario - I used to run a rootless Sparcstation SLC that would boot over the network and become an alarm clock.
- pxc 4y agoSome people sort of run their NixOS configurations this way; the root filesystem is on tmpfs https://elis.nu/blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/ https://elis.nu/blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/
- yencabulator 4y agoThe A/B-root trick exists purely to avoid having to physically visit a server to change the USB stick. (Can't overwrite in-place, as it might crash in the middle.) PXE is its own hell, having local storage for the OS avoids some horror stories like "my whole cluster booted after a power outage and now PXE fails for everything".