[Bug 587399] Re: Fix NBD Live CD Support in Ubuntu casper

[Gabriel]

Is someone working on this feature? Being able to load the squashfs directly from nbd/tftp would be very useful. Sysresccd has something like that:
http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_Booting_the_CD-ROM#Network_boot_using_PXE

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/587399

Title:
  Fix NBD Live CD Support in Ubuntu casper

Status in casper package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: casper

  == Description
  This patches /scripts/casper within initrd.lz to support booting Ubuntu Live CDs by exporting the .iso directly from nbd-server by adding netboot=nbd as a kernel command-line option.  Tested under Ubuntu 10.04.  

  == Patch Details
  The patch is simple and applies clean with one point to note:  nbd-client must be included in the initrd for the distribution.  The latest nbd-client and nbd-server source are available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nbd/.

  == Usage Example
  Prepare the server as:
     nbd-server -r 2000 /mnt/data/isos/ubuntu-10.04-desktop-amd64.iso

  And then add the following to the Live CD kernel command line:
      netboot=nbd nbdsrv=192.168.102.101

  In addition, this script fixes the NetworkManager netboot challenge
  (noted here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveCDNetboot ) for NBD-based
  netboots by disabling NetworkManager's use of the nbd-network-
  interface such that the network is still available when using
  netboot=nbd.  NFS and CIFS-based netboot code is unaffected by this
  patch.

  == NBD Kernel Command Line Options
  The following list kernel command-line options that are available with their default values:

  ===      nbdrootdev=/dev/nbd0
  The default nbd device to use for mounting the ISO (or other format) source image.  You probably will not need to use this, however, you might be able to hack this to work with another blockdevice if the LiveCD does not probe your device for CD images.

  ===      nbdfstype=iso9660
  The filesystem to mount $nbdrootdev as

  ===      nbdsrv=192.168.102.101
  The server to connect to with nbd-client 

  ===      nbdport=2000
  Default server port to connect 

  ===      nbdblocksize=1024
  nbdblocksize=1024 is default for backward-compatibility, however, a blocksize of 2048 or 4096 may have better performance.

  ===      nbdiface=eth0
  This is the Ethernet interface that is to be ignored by NetworkManager.  It is critical that this matches the interface to which there is an IP route to the nbd-server or NetworkManager will hang the system when it attempts to re-initialize eth0.

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