overlay fs booting method


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Has anybody tried this with recent versions? Although the note is a bit old I don't see why it shouldn't work with 6.9.

 

I will try it later, but has anybody been using it?

 

 

https://github.com/thohell/unRAID-bzoverlay

 

I've already been using a vmdk bootdisk for unraid under ESXi for years (Unraid boots off vmdk, but config files are still on USB).

 

The linked method has additional advantages:

-no writes to USB drive

-no need to copy boot files from USB to vmdk during upgrade.

 

 

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This has not been working since 6.4.0 at least (when bzmodules was introduced). I put some effort into retrofitting it to 6.8 but it ended up not being feasible.

With the changes in 6.9 it might be feasible again - I may have a look when I have some time (assuming no one does it sooner 🙂 ).

 

EDIT: I misspoke. I don't see that the 6.9 changes make this approach more feasible. bzmodules is still separate and needs to be pulled from the USB drive before hard drives can be accessed. This means that the only thing that can be read from HDD during bootstrap is the bootstrap code and the kernel data set (bzimage). Since no HDD access is built into that set, further bootstrap must read from USB.

 

If anyone wants to further play with that, there's an unfinished version at https://github.com/doron1/unRAID-bzoverlay . Play at your very own risk 🙂

 

Edited by doron
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