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NFS-RAMBOOT adapts my RAMBOOT hack to NFS root (PXE or not). On boot, it extracts an OS tarball from an nfs share into local RAM (recommended 3+GB of RAM). The result is like a very fast SSD.
Why do this? Compared to RAMBOOT, loading (and saving) the OS tarball over gigabit ethernet can be faster than a local hard drive or USB drive, if the file server has an SSD or a faster hard drive (compare 3.5" drives to 2.5" laptop drives, for example). Also, having the OS tarballs...
There are plenty of other diskless how-to sites out there, but I decided to post this one so it would fit in with my other similarly themed blog posts. Also, most other how-to's are a bit more complicated. This one is a simplistic setup for just one client workstation. You'd have to modify things in one way or another to handle multiple clients.
You can combine this How-To with my How-To for serving up tmpfs nfsroot on the server side. This could be useful if you want to make use...
In a previous blog post, I described how to share one computer's SSD to host another computer's OS. With a gigabit ethernet connection, the result is almost as good as a local SSD in real life desktop performance.
But what if you don't have any SSD? You can still do it, if one of your computers has at least 2GB of RAM! The nfs server in this case creates a tmpfs ramdisk and copies the OS from a hard drive copy to the ramdisk. We then use rsync when we want to sync back changes to...
Sometimes you just want to boot with GRUB2 and /boot on a local drive (hard drive or USB drive), but with root on an nfs share. Other tutorials will show you how to set this up with full blown PXE network booting. This How-To shows you how to set this up with just an nfs server. Compared to a full blown PXE netboot setup:
1) Server setup is simpler. Grub nfsroot only requires an nfs server. You do NOT need a tftp server, nor do you need a customized DHCP server.
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