Does bilibop use a lot of RAM?

How many is too many? All hard disk writes are happen in RAM. You can use noatime, nodiratime options for FS. Then all logs, /var. /tmp are in the RAM.
By default tmpfs is limited by 1/2 of RAM and you can change this value. To give you an idea, I'm using it even on very old laptop with 8 Gb RAM and no SWAP! But ... I prefer to keep only one browser with around 30 pages open and not 2 or 3 browser while watching video on this machine.

32 Gb of RAM, no swap, default tmpfs everything works perfectly: couple of browsers, video and ... virtual machine with 8 GB of virtual RAM or small local LLM.

No idea.
Had never heard of it before Devarch mentioned it.

Apparently (?) it is an alternative to [overlayroot].

[bilibop] Ubuntu manpage.

It can also be found in the Devuan repositories.

Best,

A.

Now, that one I had to look up. 8^°

Good to know, especially when I have all but decided to remain on Daedalus past [oldoldstable] and the list of software I have in my box has not changed significantly since Devuan [jesse].
ie: archived, maybe two or more years from now.

Not my case.

Thank you very much for your input.

Best,

A.

Q: anyone using overlayroot?

Altoid, I'm using bilibop from devuan/debian repository. The whole / is on overlayfs on top of tmpfs. Works fine with chimaera, daedalus, excalibur sysvinit and openrc, also with ceres dinit. All software that I use works. Some minor issues like virt-manager requests log file is simply solved by creating or copying empty log file on boot, vmware complains :"no space" - solved by one line in the config to ignore space check. There are no other issues as I remember.

There is also one issue with reboot/shutdown - 30 seconds delay if luks encryption is used together with overlayfs on top of tmpfs. Only ceres dinit (from what I've tested) has no this issue.

Sorry for the delay in answering, was away from my kb.
Or maybe the kb was away from me? 8^°

Good to know.

Thank you for the detail but I fear it is all rather over my head.
But it is good to know it works as you intended which means that it will most probably work for me.

So, one down. 8^)

The basic question for me would be if it will work for my (simple?) use case and most important, how to go about it.

To wit:

1.
Not decided yet but most probably will not be entering the Devuan Excalibur scene.
Reasons being how complicated it is getting (and will get) and the fact that (as mentioned) my box* works perfectly well with Daedalus.

That means I will not purchase any new core hardware (MB, PSU, etc.) save something wreaking havoc with my Sun U24.
Possible exceptions would be finding the odd SAS2/3 spare and matching controller, or a four socket PCI-E video card to replace the twin two socket FX580s for a decent price (liberating a PCI-E slot) or having to replace one or both of the SyncMaster 940n flanking a newer but also discontinued Dell P1914S.

*
TL;DR: all hardware that will run perfectly well with Devuan Daedalus (or even Chimaera) without a hitch - PBKAC being the obvious exception.

My idea (if feasible) is to run a Devuan Daedalus box in a highly protected space, isolated from the web for work/office crap.

And at the same time have web access by other means. eg: a VM running an up-to-date Devuan live ISO with some sort of sandboxed environment for banking, sharing downloads or video streaming (which I do quite a bit at these days).

My box hosts a headless Devuan Chimaera VM with a Pi-hole/Unbound DNS which could be moved to a RPi3B+ living in a drawer. It may then justify the time and money I spent on the bloody thing and in doing so, liberate memory (8Gb) and CPU (Intel Q9550) cycles for running the above setup.

That is about it.

Best,

A.

Aside from a post post by Ralph Ronnquist from early 2023, I have not seen or read about anyone using it.

Q: anyone using overlayroot?

Asking because I will most probably not upgrade to Excalibur, Daedalus works perfectly well with my ca. 2007 hardware, just like it did with  Jesse / ascii onwards.

Best,

A.