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Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 2,069  

overlay-root

Hello:

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.

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,950  

Re: overlay-root

I had a build host for live isos that was set up that way, but things got moved around and now I just have a regular VM to work in. I think I let that virtual host go because I couldn't do vnc with it. Other than that, it worked and I didn't notice a difference.

rbit

Administrator

Registered: 2018-06-12

Posts: 133  

Re: overlay-root

I use overlay-boot on several servers now.  A couple different configurations -- mainly using overlayfs, one is using a loop image file with drbd.  In fact just this last weekend I updated my installation of overlay-boot -- it was a bit outdated.  There's now a SHARE option that will bind-mount, which I've also found helpful for my use case.  In my overlay-boot configuration, the subhost's LOWER directory is a higher version of devuan than the hosting system (I created it with debootstrap --minbase and added things as needed).  For example, on a chimaera host I run daedalus subhosts; on a daedalus host, I run excalibur subhosts.  It's taken a bit of trial-and-error getting things set up, but for the most part it's been working well.
Did you have any particular question about overlay-boot?

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 2,069  

Re: overlay-root

Hello:

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

... worked and I didn't notice a difference.

Good to know.

... use overlay-boot on several servers ...
... bit of trial-and-error getting things set up, but for the most part it's been working well.

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^)

... any particular question about overlay-boot?

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.

Last edited by Altoid (2026-06-17 11:15:18)

Devarch

Member

Registered: 2022-10-03

Posts: 184  

Re: overlay-root

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.

Last edited by Devarch (2026-06-30 22:21:12)

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 2,069  

Re: overlay-root

Hello:

... using bilibop ...

Now, that one I had to look up. 8^°

... whole / is on overlayfs on top of tmpfs.
... fine with chimaera, daedalus, excalibur sysvinit ...
... software that I use works.

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.

... issue with reboot/shutdown - 30 seconds delay if luks ...

Not my case.

Thank you very much for your input.

Best,

A.

Last edited by Altoid (2026-07-01 15:20:23)

pcalvert

Member

Registered: 2017-05-15

Posts: 323  

Re: overlay-root

Does bilibop use a lot of RAM? I've been planning to use it, but the thought just occurred to me that it might greatly increase the amount of RAM needed.

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Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 2,069  

Re: overlay-root

Hello:

... bilibop use a lot of RAM?

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

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

"Instead of yet another new, living fast and dying young, Debian based distribution, bilibop has been designed as a set of few debian packages. bilibop-lockfs may also be installed on a laptop or on a public computer as an alternative to fsprotect or overlayroot, and bilibop-udev (or bilibop-rules) should also be installed on a LiveUSB."

[bilibop] Ubuntu manpage.

It can also be found in the Devuan repositories.

Best,

A.

Last edited by Altoid (2026-07-02 11:47:16)

Devarch

Member

Registered: 2022-10-03

Posts: 184  

Re: overlay-root

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.