The “gotcha” with Oracle free tier is that you can’t install from arbitrary media, so the typical netboot.xyz or any iPXE workflow is out. No console access, no pre-bootloader access, nothing.
I’ve been fiddling with kexec, but it doesn’t seem like a supported method of loading the lkrn file from netboot…
This is super interesting to me, so by all means, if you have the kung-fu to show how this works I would happily read through that!
Interesting. I’ve had two instances running for over 2 years and haven’t noticed that. It might be that I just don’t notice it though. I’m not scrutinizing it much.
I am not well versed with kexec but I always understood it to be a kernel reboot without power cycling the “metal.” Please enlighten us with an example! I don’t see how you’d replace the entire userspace (and possibly filesystem) with simply kexec.
Certainly! As others have said, don’t hang anything worth value on it without an out of band backup strategy, they’re famous for unscrupulously deleting things with no warning. Oracle is a miserable company.
Free is free though!
Okay this is excellent content, thank you!
I went through and fiddled with some more stuff to try and get this working to no avail. However, it inspired me to take apart netboot.xyz a bit more, and I was able to grab an efi and get next boot to load the efi file. It took me too long to realize you need the console tty arguments as part of the boot cmdline to get it working interactively, but after I got there I got it netbooted. Sadly though, it almost immediately runs into an OOM condition and thus isn’t practical on a free tier x86 asset. It would probably work on an aarch64 node, but I already have my allotted arm node spun up and working so I don’t have a free one to practice with.
Solid write-up though, thank you for putting that together!