diskless image

[aep]

Hi,
would it be possible to build a diskless (read only) image?

[jirutka]

Hi, I don’t understand your question, what exactly do you wanna achieve?

[em-ily-dev]

I'd like this too.

Hi, I don’t understand your question, what exactly do you wanna achieve?

For background, when installing alpine manually, the resulting installation can use one of three modes: diskless mode, data disk mode, and system disk mode.

Currently, all images produced by alpine-make-vm-image function as if they had been installed in system disk mode. It would be helpful if this tool could produce images that function as if they had been installed in diskless mode. Assuming OP means the same thing I do, this is what we're trying to achieve.

It means that the resulting image file should not need to be writable on the host in order to boot successfully. That's because, in diskless mode, the guest system first copies the boot filesystem to memory, then boots from there.

(IMO it would also be nice if alpine-make-vm-image could produce functional images in ISO format, but maybe that should be a separate issue.)

[em-ily-dev]

In case it's helpful, the reason I want this is that I want to guarantee that no changes will ever be made to the image. I'd also like to be able to boot more than one VM instance from the same image file concurrently.

[em-ily-dev]

I wonder if it's possible to achieve the same result using a combination of alpine-make-rootfs and setup-bootable (instead of alpine-make-vm-image).