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Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

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Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#121

Post by thinkmassive »

jcastro wrote: post #115
gettodachoppa wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea of ostree but having glanced at it, as a casual/intermediate user, it didn't seem as user-friendly as, say, Docker was (which a home user can learn in an afternoon). It wasn't obvious how to get to "Debian distro deployed as an ostree snapshot". Is this one of those things designed for career sysadmins/system builders only?

You don't consume ostree directly like that, what happens is someone would make Debian ostree-enabled OCI images for users to consume and adapt. https://opendev.org/starlingx/apt-ostree is one such effort to bring ostree to debian.

EndlessOS (mentioned in the article) is a Debian derivative based on OSTree, in development since around 2016 (maybe earlier).

You might find their forum (intended for end users, not much about development) or some of their repos useful:

https://github.com/endlessm

https://community.endlessos.com/

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#122

Post by ab71e5 »

intangible wrote: post #118

Another really nice Immutable Linux system that I'm using is VyOS.. It's targeted primarily at a router OS, but you can run containers on it now to make it pretty versatile. Basically, it's an image based OS that configures everything from a single config file on boot. https://docs.vyos.io/en/latest/introducing/about.html

Same thing for OpenWrt I think. I believe it works by using a squashfs and tmpfs and using overlayfs to overlay the tmpfs on top of the r/o filesystem. But I'm not sure that fits the definition used here for immutable OS:

> We could say that a Linux LIVE-CD is immutable, because every time you boot it, you get the exact same programs running, and you can't change anything as the disk media is read only. But while the LIVE-CD is running, you can make changes to it, you can create files and directories, install packages, it's not stuck in an immutable state.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#123

Post by aeroevan »

madspindel wrote: post #94
jdoss wrote: post #54

While I am glad Silverblue is on this list, not having Fedora CoreOS on it too is a shame. FCOS is an amazing OS to run in production and it has come a very long way since the CoreOS acquisition. I find that FCOS is a good middle ground of being usable and easy to learn while still being immutable compared to Nix. The FCOS devs introduced a new feature called CoreOS Layering which lets you define your system in a Doc…

Oh, CoreOS Layering looks really useful! I'm using openSUSE MicroOS today on some Raspberry Pi's and a x86_64 server. One reason I picked MicroOS was because it was quite simple to install on Raspberry Pi. How hard is it to install CoreOS on a Raspberry Pis? Some installation guides on the Internet look quite complex...?

For raspberry pi projects, I've used https://fedoraproject.org/iot/ which has some rough edges but is great for runing some podman containers as systemd services. It (and all of fedora IIRC) requires a pi2 or greater (armv7 or v8/aarch64) though.

But I haven't actually tried CoreOS on a pi yet, could be interesting.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#124

Post by aeroevan »

hx8 wrote: post #31
softirq wrote: post #7

Been using Fedora Silverblue since its release and it's absolutely the future. ostree is what everyone should be using.

I found Silverblue to not be flexible enough for my person computers. Maybe I use Linux in a hacky way, not having write access to /usr or /bin or other folders drove me crazy about once every two weeks. For example, I was using a script written by an ubuntu user that was looking for a library with the name/location ubuntu puts it in. Fedora uses a different name for the library. My instinct here is to create a symbo…

Or just run the script in an ubuntu environment in toolbox/distrobox?

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#125

Post by jdoss »

madspindel wrote: post #94
jdoss wrote: post #54

While I am glad Silverblue is on this list, not having Fedora CoreOS on it too is a shame. FCOS is an amazing OS to run in production and it has come a very long way since the CoreOS acquisition. I find that FCOS is a good middle ground of being usable and easy to learn while still being immutable compared to Nix. The FCOS devs introduced a new feature called CoreOS Layering which lets you define your system in a Doc…

Oh, CoreOS Layering looks really useful! I'm using openSUSE MicroOS today on some Raspberry Pi's and a x86_64 server. One reason I picked MicroOS was because it was quite simple to install on Raspberry Pi. How hard is it to install CoreOS on a Raspberry Pis? Some installation guides on the Internet look quite complex...?

FCOS has support for RPi 4s which works well https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/provision...

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#126

Post by jdoss »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #67
jdoss wrote: post #54

While I am glad Silverblue is on this list, not having Fedora CoreOS on it too is a shame. FCOS is an amazing OS to run in production and it has come a very long way since the CoreOS acquisition. I find that FCOS is a good middle ground of being usable and easy to learn while still being immutable compared to Nix. The FCOS devs introduced a new feature called CoreOS Layering which lets you define your system in a Doc…

Thanks for making this tool and showing how to get started with the layering! Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share on flatcar as the other project with CoreOS lineage? As for me my main difficulties have been figuring out what to do with these projects in a bare metal environment. Building VM images is cool, but much of the time I want to do things like install to an existing drive or even onto a ZFS pool und…

I think Flatcar is alive and well. I haven't used it personally so I can't really comment much on it.

As for building VM images, I don't actually do that in my setup. I just use the base FCOS image, boot it with a barebones Butane to configure disks and then use the CoreOS Layering features to setup my workload.

If you want to use ZFS on your setup, check out https://github.com/coreos/layering-examples/blob/main/build-... which has an example of building the ZFS on Linux module so you can setup your ZFS pools.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#127

Post by jdoss »

aeroevan wrote: post #123
madspindel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, CoreOS Layering looks really useful! I'm using openSUSE MicroOS today on some Raspberry Pi's and a x86_64 server. One reason I picked MicroOS was because it was quite simple to install on Raspberry Pi. How hard is it to install CoreOS on a Raspberry Pis? Some installation guides on the Internet look quite complex...?

For raspberry pi projects, I've used https://fedoraproject.org/iot/ which has some rough edges but is great for runing some podman containers as systemd services. It (and all of fedora IIRC) requires a pi2 or greater (armv7 or v8/aarch64) though. But I haven't actually tried CoreOS on a pi yet, could be interesting.

I actually use Fedora IOT in my datacenter rack to access my switches over LTE in an oh shit scenario. My uptime on my RPi3 B+ has been fantastic with this flavor of Fedora. I plan on switching over to FCOS on a RPi 4 soon tho.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#128

Post by 1una »

colinramsay wrote: post #75

I'm less interested in immutable systems and more in pre-configured systems. NixOS with Home Manager is the one that stands out here, but the configuration is just awful. I want to be able to have my full config in source control and know that is the state of my current system, with anything else being wiped on reboot. Anything that's changed before reboot should be highlighted. In my (limited) experience with someth…

> anything else being wiped on reboot

Have you tried Impermanence?

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#129

Post by maleldil »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #113
psd1 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential, but I had my mind blown in about 2009 by a big hypervisor running Windows remote desktop hosts. I believe it was Citrix. The VMs booted from images. The image and the mutable differencing disks were entirely in RAM (although user profiles were on spinning rust). A desktop host for 25 users would boot to accepting remote logins in about 4 seconds. Least painful Windows system to patch.

> spinning rust Weird phrasing. Haven't seen that before.

They mean hard drives. I found Torvalds saying it: https://www.wired.com/2012/10/linus-torvalds-hard-disks/
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