Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE

aniket.foo

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 108 posts

Re: Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE

#21

Post by ReDress »

anonymousiam wrote: post #12

I've done a lot of headless/diskless stuff. I haven't done much for years, because my NAS only has gigabit Ethernet ports. I can cascade them and get four Gbps downstream, but it's still painful. I have recently upgraded my house to 10Gbps Ethernet, with only one room still stuck at gigabit, and unfortunately, it's my main office. I'm working on getting the drop there now (literally, just taking a break here). Even o…

Really I wonder how this turns out to be diskless while you're clearly accessing a disk/drive over the network. Shouldn't we refer to this as network boot?

Re: Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE

#22

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

KaiserPro wrote: post #17
ggm wrote: post #3

NFS diskless is the more common approach I've used but this is very cool.

NFS diskless was easier for me to setup when I was doing it. THe caveat was, you needed readonly root, so that meant freezing the OS, anything that needed changing was either stored in a ram disk (that you need to setup) or a per host nfs area (kinda like overlayfs, but not)

Why would you need a read-only root? Do you mean to share across multiple machines?

Re: Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE

#24

Post by burner420042 »

Tepix wrote: post #23

This could be an interesting setup for booting off a NAS like Synology or QNAP. I haven't really used iSCSI, it's intimidating how much prep this takes...

The 'target' moves slow so once you learn it, it all stays relevant forever.

... And it's very, very fun.

Re: Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE

#25

Post by jaypatelani »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #7

Nice. I'm extra fond of ZFS backed network root filesystem, because it lets you put an OS on ZFS without needing to deal with ZFS support in that OS. (One of these days I want to try OpenBSD with its root on NFS on ZFS, either from Linux or FreeBSD.) Does anyone have an opinion on iSCSI vs NBD?

You might like https://smolbsd.org/

Re: Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE

#26

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jaypatelani wrote: post #25
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #7

Nice. I'm extra fond of ZFS backed network root filesystem, because it lets you put an OS on ZFS without needing to deal with ZFS support in that OS. (One of these days I want to try OpenBSD with its root on NFS on ZFS, either from Linux or FreeBSD.) Does anyone have an opinion on iSCSI vs NBD?

You might like https://smolbsd.org/

Well yes, I do like that:), but I don't see the connection to this thread?

Re: Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE

#27

Post by pdpi »

ReDress wrote: post #21
anonymousiam wrote: post #12

I've done a lot of headless/diskless stuff. I haven't done much for years, because my NAS only has gigabit Ethernet ports. I can cascade them and get four Gbps downstream, but it's still painful. I have recently upgraded my house to 10Gbps Ethernet, with only one room still stuck at gigabit, and unfortunately, it's my main office. I'm working on getting the drop there now (literally, just taking a break here). Even o…

Really I wonder how this turns out to be diskless while you're clearly accessing a disk/drive over the network. Shouldn't we refer to this as network boot?

It's diskless from the point of view of the device being booted.

Re: Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE

#28

Post by rwmj »

Tepix wrote: post #23

This could be an interesting setup for booting off a NAS like Synology or QNAP. I haven't really used iSCSI, it's intimidating how much prep this takes...

iSCSI seems intentionally obscure. One of the improvements I made to NBD was invent a simple, standardized URI format so that you can specify servers easily, eg:

  nbdinfo nbd://server
  nbdcopy nbd://server:2001/ nbd+unix:///?socket=/tmp/localsock
https://github.com/NetworkBlockDevice/nbd/blob/master/doc/ur...

Re: Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE

#30

Post by verytrivial »

I know it was just a convenient pretext for a learning journey, but do not come away from this thinking llama.cpp needs to be compiled on Windows before use. The GitHib project has a cornucopia of pre-built artifacts to use.

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/releases

Post reply on HN