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Diskless Booting For the Modern Age

Posted by timothy on from the who-needs-moving-parts dept.

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."

3 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How is it slow? by emj · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  2. Re:Cloud? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. Re:Cloud? by fredrickleo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I guess you've never heard of Applescript ;P

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    Yay me! ^^