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

[Richard W.M. Jones]

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.

It fits our purpose:

  - PXE boot will always happen over a fast LAN
  - image size isn't too large (under 200 MB for P2V and
      IIRC even less for ovirt)
  - machines are known to have sufficient RAM

> 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.

The server side of this is much harder to set up.

Rich.

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