[gentoo-soc] A Stateless Environment

[gentoo-soc] A Stateless Environment

[christo kotsi]

Hello everyone,

My name is Christos and I am a student, currently studying Materials
Science at University of Crete in Greece. This year, I am happy to be a
participant at GSOC-2017 with Gentoo as my chosen organization. The
reason of me participating, is because, for the last two years, among
the things that intrigue me the most, operating systems (more specific
Linux), have been on the top of that list.

Atom Gentoo, is the Idea which instantly caught my attention, and made
me decide to propose over, since I have always been interested to
further expand my knowledge on how Linux works, and more general, on the
fundamentals of operating systems.

The content of my proposal is about configuring a minimal Gentoo image,
that can mount and function properly with a read-only root filesystem.
The image will hold information about how to: a)  update or even
completely replace itself over the network, b) automatically change
bootflag to an alternative healthy partition in case the primary root
filesystem is lost. Additionally to the minimal Gentoo image, a server
framework will be configured, which will build and deploy the images to
the clients above, while at the same time, will provide services for
diskless nodes.

The goal is to create a fast, reliable and easy to deploy system, which
will function independently, while configuration files and user data
will be bind mounted over other local media or even over the network
(cloud).

I look forward to share more thoughts and ideas with you.

Best regards,

Christos