[Fedora-livecd-list] Live ISO within initrd for PXE Boot?

[Warren Togami]

Chris Lalancette wrote:
> Warren Togami wrote:
>> http://git.fedoraproject.org/git/?p=livecd;a=commit;h=e0f0269d3a8f8f310e7c5fdfb8af45892f419c13
>>> 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 at redhat.com