CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

Post by justincormack » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 10:57 PM UTC

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…

Post by jlgaddis » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 11:09 PM UTC

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…

Post by jlgaddis » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 11:21 PM UTC

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…

Post by samstave » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 11:43 PM UTC

286c8cb04bda wrote: post #16

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

Post by enigmo » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 11:51 PM UTC

jlgaddis wrote: post #23

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…

"Back in the day" (pre-PXE), we had rooms full of machines -- without hard drives -- that booted completely across the network and mounted all of their filesystems via NFS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskless_node Over the last few years, I've wondered why server vendors don't ship servers with type of flash-based storage (or similar) -- perhaps 4-8 GB -- that's large enough to hold an installation of (for example…