[DCKing]

I wish other distros documented ways to make it easy to customize the initramfs like this. I'd love to build a setup like this, but I don't want to use Alpine as I don't like musl for compatibility reasons or RC scripts for managing services.

There are other options, but they have considerable barriers to entry as well, like NixOS which requires learning their specific DSL. I like the idea of `bootc` but that doesn't support running from RAM best I can tell. Other distros really only document customizations to the initramfs as a means to provide an installer for a stateful system, which makes running a server like this a bit of uncharted territory.

[rollcat]

> I wish other distros documented ways to make it easy to customize the initramfs like this.

Well this is not exactly a documented or "official" way to do things, it's just that Alpine is so darn simple, that producing an elegant but crazy hack doesn't look all too different from wrangling Ubuntu to do a normal, sane thing (like installing Firefox without Snap).

In fact, building an initramfs completely from scratch, with just enough userspace to start doing useful things, is not that difficult. It's just a cpio archive with an arbitrary filesystem layout - you can drop a statically linked executable (name it "/init"), pass -kernel & -initrd to Qemu, and you've got yourself a "hello, world" of embedded/single-purpose Linux.

> I don't like musl for compatibility reasons or RC scripts for managing services

That's the point. You can afford hacks like this because you got rid of all that complexity. musl is simple. RC scripts are simple. NixOS is all but.