http://git.fedoraproject.org/git/?p=livecd;a=commit;h=e0f0269d3a8f8f310e7c5fdfb8af45892f419c13
The way it works is to bundle the complete ISO image inside the initrd. The kernel and (bloated) initrd are downloaded using PXE in the normal way, and the init script finds and loopback-mounts the ISO image and booting continues as normal.
Wow. I don't mean to offend, but this seems like an incredibly bad way of doing this. Isn't this really slow in the boot up because you must wait for the entire ISO to download? It also requires the client to have more than enough RAM to have the entire ISO in memory? It sounds like the entire memory used by the ISO remains unavailable to the booted system.
I need something similar to boot read-only OS images over PXE boot for LTSP. Upstream LTSP5 uses nbd to serve a raw squashfs image as a network block device, which means only a tiny bit needs to be in the initrd and very little memory overhead. Parts of the read-only image are streamed over the network on demand.
I'm waiting on Jeremy to get back regarding a long-term plan for supporting mayflower-like things within mkinitrd itself. NBD support was not accepted into mkinitrd because it would rely upon mayflower-like functionality to do right.
Warren Togami [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Fedora-livecd-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-livecd-list
