[agl-discussions] Network boot - Intel - nbd >= V3.10

[Jan-Simon Möller]

Am Montag, 12. Februar 2018, 08:33:24 CET schrieb Dominig ar Foll (Intel Open 
Source):
> > 
> > The good thing is that client side in the initramfs  is a userspace
> > application. So we can support both and evaluate a switch on the kernel
> > cmdline (e.g. nbd.v3=1).
> 
> I guess that the first step would be to check that nbd client >=3.1
> really supports the legacy mode as advertised.
> If that would be the case, it would be simplier.

When meta-netboot was done, we evaluated the available implementations and 
chose xnbd ( https://bitbucket.org/hirofuchi/xnbd/wiki/Home ).

There are many (partially in-)compatible implementations for 'nbd'
(see https://bitbucket.org/hirofuchi/xnbd/wiki/Home#!links ).

E.g. there seems to be now an nbdkit which sounds interesting.
Or even nbd-http seems cool (reading straight from http).
E.g. boot directly from our images on the DL-server.

We can't ensure all servers are in every host distro out of the box.
So we need to choose.
 
> > TLDR:
> > Patches welcome to the initrd mechanism to support multiple clients but
> > make it a runtime selection.
> 
> Yes, I would expect so, but would be simpler if possible to avoid :-)

Yes, if there is a more compatible *client* supporting more servers,  sure.

Could you try xnbd-server with your client implementation and provide some 
feedback, please ?

Best regards,
Jan-Simon