Easiest way to make an ephemeral VM (reboot to restore)?

Question

Easiest way to make an ephemeral VM (reboot to restore)?

PAI5REECHO opened this issue 3 years ago · 3 comments

I'd like to be able to launch my VMs to use an in-memory disk or run in some way as to not commit any changes to my real drive

Answer 1 · 2022-05-07T06:03:08.000Z

Maybe you can use this? https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence

Answer 2 · 2022-05-07T06:04:03.000Z

Otherwise just delete nixos.qcow2 after each run.

Answer 3 · 2023-03-24T18:19:56.000Z

I'd like to be able to launch my VMs to use an in-memory disk or run in some way as to not commit any changes to my real drive

I think you can just run this from within a directory that is in a tmpfs/ramfs, so the file being written to is literally in ram. Maybe there would still be some overhead from needing to serialize the file though, but still would give you ephemeral functionality + likely fast IO performance.