[Pkg-ltsp-devel] root on NBD

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2007 at 03:27:42PM -0800, vagrant at freegeek.org wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 26, 2007 at 10:36:49AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > I've been lurking on this mailinglist for a while now, and can't help
> > but notice that someone here seems to have implemented support for
> > running your root filesystem on an nbd device.
>  
> > I had been planning to add support for this to the nbd-client package
> > for a long time, but it simply hasn't happened yet. Since you guys have,
> > I'd say it's no longer necessary, either :-)
> 
> that would be great to have it integrated into the nbd-client package...

I agree :-)

> > Could anyone please point me to the stuff that does this root-on-NBD
> > support, so that I can integrate it into the nbd-client package?
> 
> the support currently requires squashfs and unionfs; the NBD part is
> read-only. i've only recently tested it with debian (ubuntu has been
> using it for some time):
> 
>  bzr get http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ltsp-upstream/ltsp/ltsp-trunk
> 
> (or browseable:
> http://codebrowse.launchpad.net/~ltsp-upstream/ltsp/ltsp-trunk/files )
> 
> the client-side code is client/initramfs/ltsp_nbd, and is installed into

That's client/initramfs/scripts/ltsp_nbd

> /usr/share/initramfs-tools and used as a boot script (i.e.
> boot=ltsp_nbd).

Right.

This script seems somewhat LTSP-specific (e.g., trying to download a
file 'lts.conf' through tftp, etc); I'm afraid that makes it less useful
to be stuck inside an nbd-client package.

I'm currently thinking of a script that would be put onto an initramfs
and which would parse the kernel commandline for command line options
such as 'nbdsrv=10.0.0.1 nbdport=1000' to set up /dev/nb0, or some such.
This would then need to be called before attempts to mount the root
filesystem are made; the actual mount of that root could be left to the
"regular" handling of the mounting of the root filesystem.

Comments?

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