The goal is to have a live Debian image that can be booted over the network and runs in RAM on baremetal. The image is rw via overlay/aufs and thus behaves like a regular system (e.g. packages can be installed). The idea is to boot baremetal hosts with this, as opposed to debian-installer, to provide a ssh-able host both to use interactively via install-console (e.g. for inspection/debugging) and for cookbooks to interact with the system (e.g. configure/provision hardware raid).
Implementation wise the following could work:
- Build Debian live artifacts (kernel/initramfs/rootfs) via live-build e.g. on build hosts
- The artifacts are then distributed via volatile like we do for debian-installer kernel/initramfs and end up on apt.w.o
- Post-boot provisioning (e.g. install root public ssh key) can happen via standard .service files, since systemd runs as normal. Or we can bake some steps at live-build time
- The sre.hosts.dhcp cookbook is used with --pxe-media console to temporarily boot the debian-live console
- Currently (Oct 2026) for this to work as a drop-in the artifacts will need to be in <os>-console/debian-installer/amd64/{linux,initrd.gz} since these are fixed in modules/install_server/files/efiboot/autoexec.ipxe
- Additionally, we require extra kernel cmdline arguments such as the url to load the rootfs from, which can be baked into the initrd via bootconfig mechanism (cfr https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/bootconfig.html) so we don't need to specialize or touch autoexec.ipxe. Only bootconfig will need to be appended to autoexec.ipxe