> It would replace nearly all bootloader drivers, and would enable very complicated booting setups, such as booting via Amazon S3 over Wi-Fi.
I hate to break it to you but this isn't possible unless the kernel has an HTTP client built-in. Netbooting sounds easy until you really start to dig into it and discover "holy shit everything about this sucks, what do you mean that it's still so dumb and will try to DOWNLOAD AN ENTIRE ISO INTO MEMORY before trying to boot unless there's a kernel+initrd option, but even then you have severe limitations"
Maybe someone can shim a tiny kernel + curl into initrd and then leverage the ability of ksplice or similar to jump into a full kernel after but there's still a lot of dragons
another one I run into all the time is SAN booting. Sounds great, iPXE supports it, so why doesn't everyone just use that? The SAN will be the block device instead of a local disk. But you can't even use this technology unless the kernel itself knows how to talk to the SAN, so it will need a full iSCSI client built in.
That's why we're stuck with NFS roots and all these other shitty options, ISOs are expected to be tiny (because memdisk), etc etc. Some distros will let you boot one way, others wont because the distro compiled the kernel with options missing, etc etc.
Fall smell is leaf mold 🍁
npub1sw…ny2dn
2026-07-30 19:55:42 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…7hst
Author Public Key
npub1swcr8w6tyv7apu54cuda5efm96mzfdl4hmg5fkcczyrjd396fpzqtny2dnPublished at
2026-07-30 19:55:42 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "\u003e It would replace nearly all bootloader drivers, and would enable very complicated booting setups, such as booting via Amazon S3 over Wi-Fi.\r\n\r\nI hate to break it to you but this isn't possible unless the kernel has an HTTP client built-in. Netbooting sounds easy until you really start to dig into it and discover \"holy shit everything about this sucks, what do you mean that it's still so dumb and will try to DOWNLOAD AN ENTIRE ISO INTO MEMORY before trying to boot unless there's a kernel+initrd option, but even then you have severe limitations\"\r\n\r\nMaybe someone can shim a tiny kernel + curl into initrd and then leverage the ability of ksplice or similar to jump into a full kernel after but there's still a lot of dragons\r\n\r\nanother one I run into all the time is SAN booting. Sounds great, iPXE supports it, so why doesn't everyone just use that? The SAN will be the block device instead of a local disk. But you can't even use this technology unless the kernel itself knows how to talk to the SAN, so it will need a full iSCSI client built in.\r\n\r\nThat's why we're stuck with NFS roots and all these other shitty options, ISOs are expected to be tiny (because memdisk), etc etc. Some distros will let you boot one way, others wont because the distro compiled the kernel with options missing, etc etc.",
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