ADR 0005: Bare-Metal Compressed Block Streaming Installation

Status

Accepted

Context

Deploying operating systems to bare-metal servers often requires heavy PXE installers, NFS shares, or saving large uncompressed 20GB+ disk images into RAM before flashing to NVMe.

Decision

We deliver compressed raw disk images (.raw.zst) and provide /usr/local/bin/imago-install-to-disk:

1. The tool streams the image over HTTPS directly through zstdcat into dd of=/dev/nvmeX bs=4M.
2. Memory consumption is limited to the zstd stream buffer (< 50MB).
3. First boot triggers growpart to expand the root partition to 100% of the physical drive.

Consequences

• Fast bare-metal provisioning directly from rescue RAM disks without intermediate disk writes or large RAM requirements.