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.
I need something similar to boot read-only OS images over PXE boot for
LTSP. Upstream LTSP5 uses nbd to serve a raw squashfs image as a
network block device, which means only a tiny bit needs to be in the
initrd and very little memory overhead. Parts of the read-only image
are streamed over the network on demand.
One architecture I've outlined here in the past, but haven't gotten
around to implementing yet is-
mount the squashfs via nfs or fuse-httpfs or the like, then otherwise do
everything else the same. Then post-boot, allow the user if they wish
to migrate the used squashfs either to ram or local disk via the same
devicemapper mirror 'trick' I used for rebootless installation.
Then subsequently (or alternately) you can use my rebootless
installation technique to convert the LiveOS(network-style) type running
OS into a completely normal installed running OS, without even having to
reboot. bwahahaha...
I forget the persons name, but I remember someone had already done the
first part of that, who posted here and on anaconda-devel within the
last year.
-dmc
I'm waiting on Jeremy to get back regarding a long-term plan for
supporting mayflower-like things within mkinitrd itself. NBD support
was not accepted into mkinitrd because it would rely upon mayflower-like
functionality to do right.
Warren Togami
wtogami(a)redhat.com
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