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CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

coreos.com

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Re: CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

#11

Post by ewams »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #10

For anyone who does not know what PXE (pixie) boot is, it is an environment to boot computers using a network interface independently of data storage devices (like hard disks) or installed operating systems. [1] In the BIOS, rather than booting from CD, or Hard disk, you would select Network. A very simplified explanation is that the PXE enabled network card (almost all modern network cards support PXE, desktop and s…

It is possible to PXE boot a full blown OS, not just OS installer, Live CD or CoreOS.

The product usually used to do this is: http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/technologies/pvs-pr... It is just a nice GUI that ties into PXE and TFTP and just streams an image from a disk file.

On a 1Gb network I have booted over 300 physical machines in under 2 minutes simultaneously.

For those curious, unfortunately PVS is packaged with XenDesktop so you have to buy XenDesktop to get PVS. Citrix does not seem willing to separate the two as different products even though I have deployed PVS for several customers without even download the XenDestkop bits.

Re: CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

#13

Post by songgao »

Awesome! My favorite part is this: http://coreos.com/docs/pxe/#state-only-installation

which would enable you to run CoreOS in memory only (loaded from PXE), but still store all of your containers on filesystem. It liberates me from having to install OS on a cluster, but still lets me use persistent storage.

Re: CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

#14

Post by devicenull »

ewams wrote: post #11
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #10

For anyone who does not know what PXE (pixie) boot is, it is an environment to boot computers using a network interface independently of data storage devices (like hard disks) or installed operating systems. [1] In the BIOS, rather than booting from CD, or Hard disk, you would select Network. A very simplified explanation is that the PXE enabled network card (almost all modern network cards support PXE, desktop and s…

It is possible to PXE boot a full blown OS, not just OS installer, Live CD or CoreOS. The product usually used to do this is: http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/technologies/pvs-pr... It is just a nice GUI that ties into PXE and TFTP and just streams an image from a disk file. On a 1Gb network I have booted over 300 physical machines in under 2 minutes simultaneously. For those curious, unfortunately PVS is pac…

DRBL can do this for Linux (if you require some software to set it up for you). You can actually accomplish this with nothing more then the linux kernel if you're clever: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/nfs/nfs...

Re: CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

#15

Post by [deleted] »

devicenull wrote: post #14
ewams wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to PXE boot a full blown OS, not just OS installer, Live CD or CoreOS. The product usually used to do this is: http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/technologies/pvs-pr... It is just a nice GUI that ties into PXE and TFTP and just streams an image from a disk file. On a 1Gb network I have booted over 300 physical machines in under 2 minutes simultaneously. For those curious, unfortunately PVS is pac…

DRBL can do this for Linux (if you require some software to set it up for you). You can actually accomplish this with nothing more then the linux kernel if you're clever: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/nfs/nfs...

[deleted]

Re: CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

#16

Post by 286c8cb04bda »

wmf wrote: post #2

Since I asked for this in the original CoreOS thread, let me be the first to say thanks. I think stateless immutable servers that boot from the network and run from RAM are going to be a great base layer to build on. BTW, if people haven't tried PXE booting before, it's pretty easy with dnsmasq. You can basically read the sample config file and uncomment a few lines. I recommend experimenting with PXE in Vagrant or o…

> BTW, if people haven't tried PXE booting before, it's pretty easy with dnsmasq. You can basically read the sample config file and uncomment a few lines.

You don't even need a config file. Here's a command line snippet I have saved for testing PXE installs:

    $ sudo dnsmasq -hdq -i en0 -p0 --enable-tftp --tftp-root=`pwd` -Mpxelinux.0 -F10.10.10.100,10.10.10.199

Re: CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

#18

Post by ook »

hosay123 wrote: post #3

Good luck finding a network infrastructure and PXE server able to boot a few hundred machines simultaneously during a power event. Yes in theory PXE boot sounds great. In reality it's a pointless SPOF. Also most likely makes it harder to reuse most of the trusted boot infrastructure that already exists for Linux. So we can assume at least in the initial release Mallory can race with the real PXE server assuming a net…

Use iPxe (http://ipxe.org/) to boot from a http image server.

Re: CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

#19

Post by johnpmayer »

volokoumphetico wrote: post #12

from the title I thought somebody had discovered a way to run an operating system on just a thin sheet of metal

Bare metal is a common term used to describe running directly on the hardware. Such as a non-virtualized operating system, or a program running without an operating system.

Or yeah, we could just downmod everybody.

Re: CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

#20

Post by voltagex_ »

PXE support on some consumer boards is a mess - often I have to use iPXE [1] just to get them loading from TFTP reliably. Now I've played with UEFI PXE boot, and it seems to be even worse - instead of requesting an "x64 bootloader", the NIC seems to request a "UEFI bytecode bootloader" which I haven't been able to supply.

[1]: http://ipxe.org/

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