Subject: running containers (Podman or Docker) in diskless mode ?

From: Jerome Marc <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2025 02:25:02 +0100

Hello,

I would like to deploy a small container on my RPI.
The OS is running in diskless mode (lbu) and I have a quite large data
partition which is read-only.
I use the data partition to store large stuff like node libraries.

By the way I was expecting to be able to start a container from this
read-only partition. As the container is immutable I don't see any reason
to make the partition rw, except of course when updating the docker image.
So does anyone tried (and hopefully succeeded) to run a container that way ?

Thank you.

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From: Guido Trotter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2025 07:24:18 +0000

If you're running just a container it should depend on what process you run
in the container... You wouldn't need to run "the os" necessarily, so using
read only would work if your process never writes to disk. In some cases
you might not need an os image at all.

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From: Jerome Marc <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2025 10:33:43 +0100

I need an image. There is no problem running the process inside the
container in a read-only root. There are options for that. But even if the
guest is read-only, it doesn't mean that the container host can use a ro
filesystem. I guess that lxc could be more flexible for that.

Le mar. 9 déc. 2025 à 08:24, Guido Trotter <[email-masked]> a écrit :

> If you're running just a container it should depend on what process you
> run in the container... You wouldn't need to run "the os" necessarily, so
> using read only would work if your process never writes to disk. In some
> cases you might not need an os image at all.
>

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From: Guido Trotter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2025 09:53:36 +0000

Sure, you're giving it an image, but what processes are you running within
that image? It all depends what your entry point and commands are, since
even if you give it the image it's not like you're "booting" Alpine to run
the container, just starting the process defined in the entry point....

Thanks,

Guido