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Diskless Booting For the Modern Age
An anonymous reader writes "Ever wonder what happened to PXE? Intel's popular standard for diskless booting hasn't been updated since 1999, and has missed out on such revolutions as wireless Ethernet, cloud computing, and iSCSI. An open source project called Etherboot has been trying to drag PXE into the 21st century. One of their programmers explains how to set up diskless booting for your cloud, using copy-on-write to save space."
Apparently PXE only allows a bootloader payload of 32KB, which makes it slow, and these days it wouldn't be a problem to fit a much more competent bootloader in flash on the mother board. So the question is why should I have to boot/download a 4MB Linux kernel to be able to use the 1Gbps drivers?
Cloud is a useful filter word, like Beowulf Cluster. If someone uses it in a non-ironic way, you know that you can safely ignore anything else that they say on the subject.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I guess you've never heard of Applescript ;P
Yay me! ^^
Warning / Rant: The last 5 years of computing have been pretty lame. Concurrency and solutions to it using functional high-level languages are the future. That's where we should have been five years ago
But five years later, that's not where we are; the world moved into a different direction. What are you going to do? You can either cling to your ideas and refuse to give them up, or accept reality and try to improve what we've got now, instead of what should have been but isn't.
Example: Plan 9 and Inferno. Much better than Unix, but didn't go anywhere. Pity? Yes, but it's futile to still hope for a takeover that'll never come.