Yet another win for Systemd.
And why would this need systemd of all things? Should basically be doable over something like SSH / TFTP, right?
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.
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.
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.
Soon we’ll be debating whether we call it systemd/linux or gnu/systemd.
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?
