Developer builds frood, a NAS that runs entirely from an Alpine Linux initramfs. The entire OS lives in a single cpio archive, so the bootloader only needs to locate a kernel and that initramfs to start. A/B swaps and rollbacks are handled by changing the boot entry, while the system definition lives in a git repo that produces the image.

Because the whole system runs in memory, read/write cycles never touch the SD card that houses the ZFS pool, extending its lifespan. Persistence relies on Alpine’s diskless mode, which applies an apkovl overlay at boot. The author found the lbu tool fragile, prompting a shift to a fully declarative approach where any file placed under the root skeleton appears in the final initramfs.

The build process uses the modest alpine-make-rootfs script, adds packages like alpine-base, linux‑lts, syslinux and openrc‑init, then packs the result into a gzip‑compressed initramfs. No separate root filesystem or modloop is required; the kernel modules reside directly in the archive. This minimalist design demonstrates that a full‑featured NAS can be assembled with a few hundred lines of script and stored entirely in RAM.