[Fedora-livecd-list] network boot feature

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sun, 2008-06-15 at 17:11 -0700, Cristian Ciupitu wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-06-16 at 2008 1:43:01 +300, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Sun, 2008-06-15 at 13:46 -0700, Cristian Ciupitu wrote:
> > > This might be a bit off-topic, but here it goes. Would someone be 
> > > interested in making the "Live CD" bootable over the network, besides
> > > CD-ROMs and USB flash drives? It would be something similar to the
> > > Knoppix Terminal Server. Here are some of the benefits:
> > [snip]
> > > It would be even nicer if the whole root could be stored in the RAM, but
> > > this is not a priority right now.
> > 
> > So there's already the livecd-iso-to-pxeboot script.  It basically takes
> > it and makes it so that you grab the entire rootfs via tftp when pxe'ing
> > and thus puts it in RAM.  For some cases, this works...
> 
> I didn't know about this script, but I will surely try it. It should be promoted
> more :-)

It's relatively new

> > > I have done something similar for Red Hat 7.1, only that the root was
> > > shared over NFS and it was writable. Also, this time, I would like to
> > > see this integrated in the upstream.
> > 
> > But to do more (such as NFS or NBD), we really need to finish getting to
> > where we use more of the standard Fedora initrd infrastructure so that
> > we don't have to re-invent the wheel for things like network bring-up,
> > etc
> 
> That's why I want this integrated into mainstream, to reuse as much as
> possible from the Fedora infrastructure, instead of rolling my own. Is
> there a todo/bug list regarding this? I've already looked at the
> livecd-tools bug list and I haven't seen anything regarding this.

There's been discussion about it here a few times.  The short summary is
that mkinitrd supports all of the various methods of booting _except_
for the livecd.  But the livecd benefit strongly benefits from using
bash rather than nash as the script interpreter.  So part of the idea is
moving to where we have bash as the interpreter and nash as some of the
utilities.  But this isn't the best place for the discussion as pjones
isn't on this list

Jeremy