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.
Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
131–140 of 164 posts
Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
I'd be awesome if there was a community effort around bringing the layering functionality and bootc enablement to all of Debian and then we could have our cake and eat it too!
Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
NixOS gives you precisely this kind of control- through a few different mechanisms. Some packages in nixpkgs, and most NixOS and home manager modules, expose a lot of configuration options where you can configure various plugins, add extra packages, etc. Nix also lets you provide overlays and overrides to add custom packages (new packages, or customized versions of existing packages) and gives you the option of chang…
Would you have any examples of this to hand? I've been trying to find a clean way to share an altered qemu derivation that isn't just me copying and maintaining the qemu/default.nix but so far that has been the easiest.
https://rebeccaskinner.net/posts/2021-06-06-nixifying-a-haky...
Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
#134Off topic, but does anyone know how to find out where mutable data for NixOS modules are stored at (e.g. the data directory for a database) without reading the source? Occasionally, it's mildly annoying, and would be comforting to know with certainty where all my state is.
Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
#135" system upgrades aren't done on the live system packages changes are applied on the next boot you can roll back a change Depending on the implementation, a system may offer more features. But this list is what a Linux distribution should have to be labelled "immutable" at the moment." Immutable. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
#136No mention of proprietary drivers such as nVidia's? §
They work perfectly fine on NixOS at least, can't speak for the others.
Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
#137If you ran root on ZFS with a single mount / form, and snapshotted it immediately after install, would that count as "immutable" in this logic?
- upgrades/changes are atomic
- it's very clear whose responsibility it is to track what state, i.e., what parts of the filesystem are snapshotted and when
- it's easy to revert to any snapshot at boot time
- you're unlikely to have 'gaps' where you wish there was a snapshot but there isn't one
- snapshotting applies to configuration changes as well as package (un)installation
You can get most of those benefits of the box on openSUSE or other distros where the default filesystem is copy-on-write and the package manager is configured to take snapshots for you. You can also get something like that for configuration management via etckeeper, which gives you version control for system-wide config files. A distro which only takes these steps may not always be considered 'immutable Linux' as immutable distros typically go further, either in limiting what changes are possible outside the blessed methods (which generate new snapshots) or how what kinds of configuration/persistence it manages. But at some point it's just a question of degrees.As it happens, snapshotting with automatic reversion is an approach some take with NixOS to better ensure that its configuration management is comprehensive. You can force all of your persistence requirements to be explicit by reverting to an old snapshot on boot.
Blog post which (afaik) first presented this idea to the community: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/
Common implementation for NixOS: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence
Presentation on that implementation from NixCon 2023 (just a couple weeks ago!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtBouFMyrWg
Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
#138Been using Fedora Silverblue since its release and it's absolutely the future. ostree is what everyone should be using.
Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
#139Currently this is supported on Triton DataCenter only, but our internal roadmap has us building a standalone version similar to how folks use SmartOS standalone.
Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> spinning rust Weird phrasing. Haven't seen that before.
If you Google it, it's a pretty common phrase referring to magnetic disk as opposed to SSD. Could even be applied to drum, I suppose, if you could still find any...