Frood, an Alpine Initramfs NAS (2024)
My NAS, frood , has a bit of a weird setup. It’s just one big initramfs containing a whole Alpine Linux system. It’s delightful and I am not sure why it’s not more common.
If this already sounds appealing, you can skip to the “How it works” section below.
I have updated this post for my 2025-onwards setup, which moved to a 64-core Ampere Altra and removed the bootloader in favor of a single-file UKI.
I’ve always liked running systems from memory: it’s fast and prevents wear on the system storage device, which is often some janky SD card, because the good drives are dedicated to the ZFS pool.
However, you immediately have the problem of how to persist configuration changes.
Alpine’s answer to this is “ diskless mode ” where any customization is kept in an overlay file. After boot, the stock system looks for a file matching *.apkovl in all available filesystems, applies it, and then installs any missing apk packages from a local cache.