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I feel like this is, on one hand, an amazing thing to be able to do because it removes the necessity to have IPMI to remotely re-install a system.

On the other hand, this seems like it would be an incredibly easy thing to screw up and potentially leave yourself with a corrupted or unbootable system.

Hence the advice to only do this on machines where you have physical access, or at least can trigger a PXE boot via IPMI.

Which is fundamentally how an installer works already.

Look up the chroot-install method for Debian/Ubuntu, as an example of this in a user-accessible manner. The process uses debootstrap, but as I understand was originally developed via a chroot shell on a running system and either partition or ramdisk-based bootstrapping of a new system.

This scripts creates another root, then substitutes /sbin/init using `mount --bind`, then reloads /sbin/init, which pivots into new root with fakeinit.

IMHO, systemd in container mode can be used instead of fakeinit.