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iSCSI boot? - degeulars - 5th Mar, 2016 07:02 PM

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone has experimented getting xbian to boot from an iSCSI target? I know Xbian
can boot using NFS.

I recently spent weeks getting a normal raspbian install to boot from an iSCSI target, I ended up
having to use dracut to make the initramfs and recompile the kernel to include iSCSI support.

Does anyone have any experience with this on Xbian?

Does anyone know if the Xbian kernel has iSCSI support already built in?

How much is the xbian kernel modified compared to the standard raspberry pi kernel?

Could I just reuse my 4.1.17+ kernel with iSCSI support and my existing initramfs and just copy over
the xbian rootfs to my iSCSI target or does the custom Xbian initramfs contain something essential?
I don't mind not having the fancy Xbian boot splash. Would the normal kernel be a major performance
hit to Xbian compared to the Xbian optimised? I am using a RaspberryPi B 512MB ram.

What would I have to add to the Xbian initramfs scripts to get it to mount an iSCSI rootfs?

My iSCSI targets sit on a FreeNAS machine so it has ZFS with snapshots and so on, would it be best to
still use BTRFS or migrate over to Ext4 since the underlying ZFS takes care of all the snapshots and
error correction?

Thank you for any ideas on the matter!

RE: iSCSI boot? - Nachteule - 6th Mar, 2016 12:42 AM

Huh, a lot of questions Smile
(5th Mar, 2016 07:02 PM)degeulars Wrote:  I was wondering if anyone has experimented getting xbian to boot from an iSCSI target? I know Xbian
can boot using NFS.
No yet. I'm using iSCSI and booting diskless via PXE from an openSUSE client, but it was a real pain to get it work
Done this many years ago.

Quote:I recently spent weeks getting a normal raspbian install to boot from an iSCSI target, I ended up
having to use dracut to make the initramfs and recompile the kernel to include iSCSI support.

Does anyone have any experience with this on Xbian?
Not me

Quote:Does anyone know if the Xbian kernel has iSCSI support already built in?
A short view into .config tells me iSCSI is not there

Quote:How much is the xbian kernel modified compared to the standard raspberry pi kernel?
LZ4 support for BTRFS is added
BFQ is added
You can have a look to the additions here
(latest 6 commits)

Quote:Could I just reuse my 4.1.17+ kernel with iSCSI support and my existing initramfs and just copy over
the xbian rootfs to my iSCSI target or does the custom Xbian initramfs contain something essential?
I don't mind not having the fancy Xbian boot splash. Would the normal kernel be a major performance
hit to Xbian compared to the Xbian optimised? I am using a RaspberryPi B 512MB ram.
with BTRFS compiled in kernel and added LZ4 support for BTRFS it should work

Quote:What would I have to add to the Xbian initramfs scripts to get it to mount an iSCSI rootfs?
Don't know

Quote:My iSCSI targets sit on a FreeNAS machine so it has ZFS with snapshots and so on, would it be best to
still use BTRFS or migrate over to Ext4 since the underlying ZFS takes care of all the snapshots and
error correction?
I'm not sure if XBian still works with an ext4 root fs