Thanks a lot. Something is still not clear to me though. I'm using gPXE on a diskless workstation. I use gPXE to download a small ramdisk. Then I use this one to do a secondary download of the remaining contents. After the download I can do a pivot_root and switch to the new filesystem.
Yet the space I have left is 1.5G (since I'm doing first download with gPXE and the image can't be bigger than 1.5GB). I'm sure I'm missing something, but having everything in RAM, after I download a small ramdisk with gPXE, where do I save the content of the secondary download (which is going to be around 4G)? Thanks, Luca On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 10:37 AM, H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]> wrote: > On 12/11/2009 07:28 AM, Luca wrote: > > Thank you. So gPXE can address 4GB of RAM. > > > > Then, if I gPXE boot with the following script > > > > #!gpxe > > > > kernel https://192.168.1.189/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 init=linuxrc > > initrd https://192.168.1.189/ramdisk.img > > boot > > > > the ramdisk's size could not exceed 2G (considering gPXE has to download > > it and then load it in memory)? > > > > Something like that. In practice it is probably closer to 1-1.5 GB. > > You also don't want to actually use a ramdisk -- initramfs is a *lot* > more efficient. > > However, realistically you probably don't want to do that. Instead you > want to bring up a reasonably small ramdisk that contains the contents > needed to do a secondary download of the remaining contents. The > reasons are very simple: no need to double buffer, Linux has a *much* > more advanced IP stack that gPXE (for, I hope, obvious reasons -- not > picking on gPXE here), and no 4 GB limitation. > > As such, you should get much better preformace that way, and when you're > talking gigabytes, that matters. > > -hpa > > -- > H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center > I work for Intel. I don't speak on their behalf. > > _______________________________________________ > gPXE mailing list > [email protected] > http://etherboot.org/mailman/listinfo/gpxe >
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