Developer Successfully Boots Up Linux on Google Drive

Its FOSS writes: When it comes to Linux, we get to see some really cool, and sometimes quirky projects (read Hannah Montana Linux) that try to show off what’s possible, and that’s not a bad thing. One such quirky undertaking has recently surfaced, which sees a sophomore trying to one-up their friend, who had booted Linux off NFS. With their work, they have been able to run Arch Linux on Google Drive. Their ultimate idea included FUSE (which allows running file-system code in userspace). The developer’s blog post explains that when Linux boots, “the kernel unpacks a temporary filesystem into RAM which has the tools to mount the real filesystem… it’s very helpful! We can mount a FUSE filesystem in that step and boot normally…. ” Thankfully, Dracut makes it easy enough to build a custom initramfs… I decide to build this on top of Arch Linux because it’s relatively lightweight and I’m familiar with how it work.” Doing testing in an Amazon S3 container, they built an EFI image — then spent days trying to enable networking… And the adventure continues. (“Would it be possible to manually switch the root without a specialized system call? What if I just chroot?”) After they’d made a few more tweaks, “I sit there, in front of my computer, staring. It can’t have been that easy, can it? Surely, this is a profane act, and the spirit of Dennis Ritchie ought’t’ve stopped me, right? Nobody stopped me, so I kept going…” I build the unified EFI file, throw it on a USB drive under /BOOT/EFI, and stick it in my old server… This is my magnum opus. My Great Work. This is the mark I will leave on this planet long after I am gone: The Cloud Native Computer. Despite how silly this project is, there are a few less-silly uses I can think of, like booting Linux off of SSH, or perhaps booting Linux off of a Git repository and tracking every change in Git using gitfs. The possibilities are endless, despite the middling usefulness. If there is anything I know about technology, it’s that moving everything to The Cloud is the current trend. As such, I am prepared to commercialize this for any company wishing to leave their unreliable hardware storage behind and move entirely to The Cloud. Please request a quote if you are interested in True Cloud Native Computing. Unfortunately, I don’t know what to do next with this. Maybe I should install Nix? Read more of this story at Slashdot.