Yet another win for Systemd.
Soon we’ll be debating whether we call it systemd/linux or gnu/systemd.
Red Hat: “we put the D in your System”
Can someone eli5 pls?
“target disk mode”, which this claims to be taking a lot of inspiration from, pretty much turns your computer into an external harddrive - so you can connect another machine to it for direct access. This appears to be trying to accomplish the same, but over the network.
If you’ve ever stuffed up a machine so badly that the best idea you could come up with, was to take the harddrive out and work on it from another machine - this pretty much allows you to do that. But instead of taking the drive out and putting it an external drive enclosure, you just ask the stuffed up machine to act as the external drive enclosure.
Great answer
Oh okay. Thanks for the simple explanation :)
same, i have no idea what any of that means and i use runit
runit gang !
From what I understand it’s basically like a “thin client” type of thing where the client loads the Kernel from local storage up to a certain point and then boots into a rootfs that is somewhere else on a remote server.
Kinda like pxe boot?
Basically, your system, if asked to, will boot into a limited mode where it exposes its drives over NVMe-TCP. It’s like taking the hard drive out and putting it into a different PC, but over the network.
Similar but in this case the Linux Kernel/Init System act as the PXE firmware so you don’t need a TFTP Server to load initramfs and a Kernel image. And you don’t need a NFS or Samba server because the Server has the drive with the rootfs already exposed to the network.
Target disk mode is fantastic, I’m thrilled to see this coming to Linux
Worked in IT, target disk mode is a life saver when you have to recover data from a laptop with a broken screen/keyboard/bad ribbon cable and don’t want to take apart something held together by glue.
So this is a service aimed at exposing disks as nvme-tcp boot targets on boot of the system? I mean I love it, I wonder if this could be used to help with a chicken and egg problem I’ve had with building clustered systems easier. So far I either need a running service to host a network file system (like NFS or CEPH), or I need local disks that bootstrap the clustered storage environment.
Oh, another arm growing.
Yay, yet another storage protocol over the network.
This seems like a win for almost all distros
Is this like booting over pxe? Is nvme tcp widely supported on motherboards?
How do you think file systems would be handled? Apple’s SCSI/FireWire/USB/Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode just made all disks available over the interface in a filesystem-agnostic manner. Would I be able to see my ext4 boot partition, ZFS arrays, and any attached volumes?
As with Apple’s implementation, filesystems aren’t handled - whatever device you connected with would see block devices, essentially no different from a physical disk in your system.
And why would this need systemd of all things? Should basically be doable over something like SSH / TFTP, right?
Not compelling to me. Gonna stick with runit and/or s6 on my Artix Linux systems at home. But you do you Lennart.
Same for me, but dinit
