Chris Lalancette wrote:
Warren Togami wrote:
>
http://git.fedoraproject.org/git/?p=livecd;a=commit;h=e0f0269d3a8f8f310e7...
>> The way it works is to bundle the complete ISO image inside the initrd.
>> The kernel and (bloated) initrd are downloaded using PXE in the normal
>> way, and the init script finds and loopback-mounts the ISO image and
>> booting continues as normal.
> Wow. I don't mean to offend, but this seems like an incredibly bad way
> of doing this. Isn't this really slow in the boot up because you must
> wait for the entire ISO to download? It also requires the client to
> have more than enough RAM to have the entire ISO in memory? It sounds
> like the entire memory used by the ISO remains unavailable to the booted
> system.
Well, it depends on your definition of "bad". For the purposes I
originally wrote it for, the ISO is going to be fairly small (~70MB or
less), and the target machines will have a lot of memory. So for that
situation, it works well enough, doesn't waste an appreciable amount of
memory, and fits into existing tools fairly easily.
Ah, I didn't realize that you were using livecd-tools and mayflower for
a rescue or install type image. ~70MB really isn't so bad, and you are
right about one less service to configure being a benefit.
Warren Togami
wtogami(a)redhat.com