I have recently decided to update my beaglebone black from Debian 11.x to Debian 12.x. However I cannot get overlayroot to work on any Debian 12.x image I have found/made, a few examples of them being :
I have tried activating overlayroot both by adding “overlayroot=tmpfs” to the cmdline line in /boot/uEnv.txt and modifying /etc/overlayroot.conf with the same text.
The only error I have found is when running dmesg | grep overlayroot on images with kernel 6.1 :
[ 0.000000] Kernel command line: console=ttyS0,115200n8 root=/dev/mmcblk1p1 ro rootfstype=ext4 rootwait coherent_pool=1M net.ifnames=0 lpj=1990656 rng_core.default_quality=100 quiet overlayroot=tmpfs
[ 0.000000] Unknown kernel command line parameters “overlayroot=tmpfs”, will be passed to user space.
Did something change for overlayroot in Debian 12 compared to Debian 11 ? I noticed the overlayroot package moved from repo_rcnee_pkg_list to deb_include in the config files in omap-image-builder/configs at master · RobertCNelson/omap-image-builder · GitHub but I have not found any information on changes for enabling it.
Did you get any answers on this?
Seeing how this question is at least a year old,
we probably shouldn’t be “digging up corpses”, right?
What you’re doing is considered “necro’ing” by a lot of folks and generally frowned upon.
If you’re curious, please raise this as a new question…
Did you test it? Pretty sure I fixed this
Not yet, Doing a little research first. Google provided minimal links, searched here found this thread. Do you know if anyone has got this functional?
Better to use old thread to show the history and documentation. Having things spread out in many threads is schizophrenic
This forum has data all the way back to 2013…
overlayroot was fixed last Jun 6 2025… : History for debian-12-cloud-initramfs-tools - beagleboard/repos-armhf · GitHub
We are synced up with ubuntu questing.. Ubuntu – Details of source package cloud-initramfs-tools in questing
let’s check resolute: Ubuntu – Details of source package cloud-initramfs-tools in resolute
0.49 vs 0.57:
looks like i need to split out trixie + based on: cloud-initramfs-tools - [no description]
and maybe… cloud-initramfs-tools - [no description]
Yeah Trixie/Forky need an upgrade, but Debian 12 is fine..
Ubuntu is moving to dracut, this doesn’t affect Debian 12…
Regards,
To fully utilize 0.57 in trixie, i really need to backport dracut 110 from forky..
“Yeah Trixie/Forky need an upgrade, but Debian 12 is fine..”
I would like to use trixie. What’s the status with that?
I’ve used overlayroot for years on x86 boards. Seems to work well at preventing sd card and SSD file corruption on power cycles.
Well this thread was about Debian 12…
it works today as of the Jun 6, 2025 commit as above..
Should be pre-installed..
voodoo@21-am335x-bbb:~$ dpkg --list | grep overlay
ii overlayroot 0.49bbbio1~trixie+20250606 all use an overlayfs on top of a read-only root filesystem
Regards,
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You know Robert, I’m just now understanding how fast things are changing in this area. Thanks for your help and patience
Every 2 years we get a new Debian release… the Issue with Debian 12, ubuntu had forked the ‘package’ and never merged it back.. So overlayroot is in a weird state where the Ubuntu release is many years ahead of Debian’s version where it is abandoned.
Regards,