Filippo Valsorda, a well-known cryptographer and open source maintainer, has built an unconventional approach to network storage called Frood—it runs an entire Alpine Linux system directly from RAM as a single initramfs image, bypassing traditional disk-based booting entirely. The payoff is striking: zero disk wear, system configuration tracked declaratively in git, atomic rollbacks with A/B boot options, and remarkably few moving parts. Valsorda built this with roughly three hundred lines of shell script, a clean setup script for system services, and git-tracked root skeleton files—any file you want to exist simply gets added to the source tree. The only persistence comes from a USB drive, storing just the random number generator seed and Tailscale state. He even tests the entire system with a single qemu command. According to Valsorda, the approach elegantly sidesteps Alpine's flaky legacy persistence layer by making persistence the exception, not the default.

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