I have a fresh Pi 4 4GB intended for a Linux/NAS server and as a target for Ansible playbooks and never intend to play around with the hardware side of things.
What config.txt settings are suggested for this purpose? E.g. disable GPIO, wifi, bluetooth, etc. I'm using UEFI https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/blob/master/config.txt so I can use standard ARM images (AlmaLinux 10) and developing Ansible playbooks on the Pi should in the future let me set up a full server on more standard hardware. Ideally there's a list of recommended settings proven to be relatively safe to use (from glancing at the documentation https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentati ... ation.html, a lot seems hardware-related that can probably be disabled. There is also concern with simply applying some of these settings myself because with overlays, it seems order matters (it's not necessarily as straightforward as simply including key-value pairs anywhere in the config.
I have old SD cards lying around that I will probably burn through using for rootfs.
On that note, I'm wondering how well overlayfs works or if it's too quirky to use for a standard Linux server. It's primary purpose is to obviously reduce writes to cheap flash media which is important because the PI has no SATA ports for reliability. I'm not sure how well it works in practice--I imagine a user-friendly way to e.g. automatically commit changes on package install/update/removal. I'm not sure how e.g. what happens when tmpfs runs out or if the data gets rotated while the lower filesystem is read-only which is prioritized to keep in tmpfs for later writing, etc.
Any tips and suggestions are much appreciated--the documentation is a little overwhelming (being thorough, which is a good thing)--asking here because I'm sure many people happily use Pi as a server and I want to optimize for it, especially since I'm not using Raspberry Pi OS which provides this out of the box for the most part.
What config.txt settings are suggested for this purpose? E.g. disable GPIO, wifi, bluetooth, etc. I'm using UEFI https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/blob/master/config.txt so I can use standard ARM images (AlmaLinux 10) and developing Ansible playbooks on the Pi should in the future let me set up a full server on more standard hardware. Ideally there's a list of recommended settings proven to be relatively safe to use (from glancing at the documentation https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentati ... ation.html, a lot seems hardware-related that can probably be disabled. There is also concern with simply applying some of these settings myself because with overlays, it seems order matters (it's not necessarily as straightforward as simply including key-value pairs anywhere in the config.
I have old SD cards lying around that I will probably burn through using for rootfs.
On that note, I'm wondering how well overlayfs works or if it's too quirky to use for a standard Linux server. It's primary purpose is to obviously reduce writes to cheap flash media which is important because the PI has no SATA ports for reliability. I'm not sure how well it works in practice--I imagine a user-friendly way to e.g. automatically commit changes on package install/update/removal. I'm not sure how e.g. what happens when tmpfs runs out or if the data gets rotated while the lower filesystem is read-only which is prioritized to keep in tmpfs for later writing, etc.
Any tips and suggestions are much appreciated--the documentation is a little overwhelming (being thorough, which is a good thing)--asking here because I'm sure many people happily use Pi as a server and I want to optimize for it, especially since I'm not using Raspberry Pi OS which provides this out of the box for the most part.
Statistics: Posted by zff — Thu Jun 26, 2025 2:09 am