Hi all! I would like to report an interesting finding:
The package di-netboot-assistant offers the feature to loop-mount Debian live ISO images and provide them over the network as PXE-netboot live systems. To avoid the download of the whole root file system (image), it is possible to provide the 'filesystem.squasfs' via NFS. However, if multiple ISO images are made available in that way, it fails: All PXE clients receive the same 'filesystem.squasfs', even if a different flavor of ISO is chosen in the di-netboot menu. I tracked this down and it looks to me like a more or less known limitation of NFS [1]: Looking at the inode numbers of the loop mounted live images shows that files with identical names share the same number. For the current (12.0) images: inode filename 6214 filesystem.packages 6218 filesystem.squashfs 6222 initrd.img 6231 vmlinuz This is of course no problem locally, as identical numbers are on different file systems. However, for NFS this information seems to get lost and NFS clients see the 'same' file (perhaps the first one read?). As the same problem did not pop up earlier in bullseye, the identical inode numbers might be a reason of the modified built process for bookworm images. I guess, for a more advanced di-netboot-assistant, the relevant files need to be copied to the local file system, when sharing them via NFS is needed. If anybody knows a more elegant solution let me know! Best regards, Andi [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/895444/
