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

[Jerry Vonau]

Douglas McClendon wrote:
> Warren Togami wrote:
>>
>> 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.

Think that was me... I've hacked up anaconda's init to not exit, then 
call run-init, if the right boot flag is set. Why hack anaconda's init? 
Because all the network bits are there with a GUI to use to configure 
the network for nfs or searching for an iso image/cd.  Then, if you 
don't want to type you could use a kickstart file/boot cmdline to set 
the boot arguments. I'm looking to try a reboot-less install from within 
anaconda. What I'm looking to do is to install a live(cd) image by 
anaconda via nfs,hd,cd. Once that is in place, exit anaconda, run-init 
on the newly cloned install, calling first-boot to configure and 
customize the rest of the package selection. Does this sound 
do-able/reasonable?

Jerry