Running Alpine in Live mode in QEMU

To just give Alpine Linux a try in diskless mode, qemu can be used to boot the .iso file without any need for a virtual HDD image or further configuration.

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 512 -nic user -boot d -cdrom alpine-3.20.3-x86_64.iso --accel kvm

Letting the .iso image load an apkovl

This works by mounting a persistent filesystem under /media and selecting it to store the apkovl and the apkcache.

Preparing a KVM with a virtual drive:

mkdir -p /media/usb/images qemu-img create -f raw /media/usb/images/mykvm.config 32M qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 384 \ -name mykvm \ -cdrom /media/usb/images/alpine-3.20.3-x86_64.iso \ -drive file=/media/usb/images/mykvm.config,if=virtio \ -net lan \ -boot d &

And inside the KVM (running Alpine Linux):

fdisk /dev/vda  #creating a partition
mkdosfs /dev/vda1
mkdir -p /media/vda1
echo "/dev/vda1 /media/vda1 vfat rw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
mount -a
setup-alpine  # (select vda1 for saving configs)
lbu commit

The next reboot then loads the generated apkovl and apkcache found on /dev/vda1 -- completely running-from-ram based on the latest official ISO.