Lampone Pi

Lampone Pi

LAMPONE PI

An operating system for indestructible Raspberry Pi installations

Lampone Pi is a live Debian GNU/Linux Buster arm64 operating system for the Raspberry Pi microcomputer boards. It’s the only live ISO 9660 operating system for the Pi which can also perform kernel updates. Although it is not affiliated or derived from Raspbian, it’s the homologous of Raspbian Lite (they both derive from Debian), but differently it’s a 64bit live OS. Lampone Pi is at the moment compatible with the Raspberry Pi 3 family.

:: resilient

A Debian GNU/Linux (Buster) derivative with a unique partitioning scheme crafted for maximizing the strength against filesystem corruption: the ISO9660 system partition is read-only by design at filesystem-level. No more of the following…

:: ductile

Persistence partition contains only the diffs from the stock installation; system updates and your data lay there – you can do system backups/snapshots by just copying the files contained within the 4th partition (rw folder).

Download the image

Lampone Pi comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law.

Download Lampone Pi for the Pi 3 family here (img md5: f49cc0620dbbf705ffcc5c3bd4f9becf).

You can write the image file to a micro-SD card (8GB minimum) as you do with any other Raspberry Pi operating system.

Root password: password (console, ssh).
Network: DHCP by default.

Writeable (persistence) filesystem is 1GB in size for this image.
You can resize it to fill the whole SD card’s space with:
printf "d\n4\nn\np\n\n\nn\nw\n" | fdisk /dev/mmcblk0; sync; sleep 10
resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p4
reboot

Open source

Lampone Pi is a free and open-source software, whose development is hosted on GitHub. Feel free to contribute to the projects.

Technically it’s a Debian arm64 derivative with a unique partitioning scheme crafted for maximizing the strength against filesystem corruption: the ISO9660 system partition (here mmcblk0p2) is read-only by design at filesystem-level. The data persistence partition (here mmcblk0p4) contains only the delta: system updates and your data lay there. mmcblk0p1 is the efi FAT boot partition.

The data partition mounted on top of a read-only system partition makes the resulting operating system resistent to filesystem-corruption. Moreover, you can do complete system backups by just tar-ring only the files contained within that partition.

And why the thrid partition?

The complete “liveng” specification can be found at: liveng.readthedocs.io.

Lampone Pi is a fully functioning operating system, but as of now it’s not fully tuned for the Pi (drivers, GPU acceleration, …): maintainers are needed.

Case study: kernel update

Lampone Pi features a read-only ISO 9660 system partition but it’s able to update the kernel, it’s magic heh?

Here a user demonstration.

As you can see, at every kernel update the third small partition is overwritten. The GRUB bootloader is instructed to boot by default from this partition, because that one always contains the most updated kernel and initrd files.

The second partition’s files are kept at their default state and can be useful in case of recovery or when a complete persistence reset is performed; the big filesystem.squashfs file is saved within this partition so it isn’t touched during kernel updates.

Usage example

Here the Raspberry Digital Signage stack is deployed onto a Lampone Pi operating system instead of using the Raspberry Pi Os/Raspbian backend (showing the Resilient Linux website). This build is not available for download, but it’s a “research” operating system.

Lampone Pi is a fully functioning operating system, but as of now it’s not fully tuned for the Pi (drivers, GPU acceleration, …): maintainers are needed.

Raspberry Digital Signage and Raspberry Slideshow are still based on Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian).