Oleg Goldshmidt pub@goldshmidt.org writes:
Adam Sulmicki adam@cfar.umd.edu writes:
Having said this all I think someone else did some work in that area, transparent forwarding of disk I/O or some such..either way it would be proprietary binary only stuff..
I am not sure what the OP meant by "diskless". If the question is about booting Windows from a networked disk on a computer without a local disk, then it is possible booting off an iSCSI disk. Check
http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/projects/storage/iboot/
Disclosure: I work at IBM's Haifa Labs - iBOOT is rather routine for us.
My general impression with this is that you still need iscsi drivers on the OS side to make this work. And that you have to be quite careful at the transition point on the OS side. Not knowing how windows works this is where I get leery of these kinds of things.
It sounds like from the description there is no way to do windows diskless without emulating a disk.
I have serious issues with iSCSI because the only implementation I have seen was tremendously complex and nasty looking. Which is a real downside when compared to something simple like nbd.
How well does iBOOT work on the linux side. I guess if you can get a kernel and ramdisk into memory with lilo or something like that using the legacy BIOS calls it should work ok. If you have an iSCSI driver for Linux.
Eric