OS image Generic x86_64 directly boot without installer

Feature Requests
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1

Currently x86_64 images (Intel NUC, Generic x86_64, …) boot into an installer which silently installs the system on the first best drive by default.

It would be great if the OS image could be flashed to e.g. an USB drive and directly booted without the need of a separate system drive.

Possible ways:

  • The system could figure out the matching drivers (graphics, networking, …) on boot
  • The system is installed on a new partition of the USB drive/SD card and then reboots into the newly installed system on the same thumb drive.
2

Alex Gonzalez: Actually, booting to a liveUSB is already supported. You will need to extract the direct boot/raw image from the flasher using an unwrapper script (GitHub - balena-os/balena-image-flasher-unwrap: Tool for unwrapping balena-image from a balena-image-flasher), and then you can program that into a USB disk and boot directly.
We are working on surfacing both flasher and direct boot images in the dashboard so both can be downloaded separately to make things easier.

We are also working on an installer image that will install into the same drive it is booted from to cover some use cases like migrating from a different OS into balenaOS and secure boot and disk encryption installs on non-flasher devices. But that is separate from booting a liveUSB.

3

Unwrapping an image works like a charm. Many thanks!

4

Alex Gonzalez set the status to Completed

This is already possible with direct boot/raw images.