iSCSI boot ... root?

[John Nielsen]

On Sep 16, 2013, at 4:35 AM, Edward Tomasz Napierała <trasz at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Wiadomość napisana przez Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble at gmail.com> w dniu 16 wrz 2013, o godz. 07:35:
>> Is it now possible to boot from iSCSI?  I'm not talking about an iSCSI
>> controller, but with
>> 
>> pxe -> dhcp -> tftp (loads loader) -> (something) -> boot (mounts root from
>> iSCSI)
> 
> Not yet.  The iSCSI initiator requires iscsid(8) in order to work, and you can't
> run it before mounting root.
> 
> I think the proper way to do this would be by doing something similar to Linux'
> initrd; i.e. booting from mdroot loaded by loader(8), run iscsid(8) from there,
> setup iSCSI session, then mount the real root and pivot to it.  I'm not sure if it's
> possible right now.

I'm not sure to what extent trasz's work overlaps with this, but I was able to boot a FreeBSD 9.1 image via iSCSI using aoyama's isboot module. I used gPXE and UNDI since my BIOS and NIC don't have any iSCSI support, just vanilla PXE. I haven't heard anything about isboot lately but the links below are still active. Let me know if you'd like additional details.

JN

On Aug 23, 2012, at 6:25 PM, Daisuke Aoyama <aoyama at peach.ne.jp> wrote:
> Subject: Updated isboot 0.2.6 and FreeBSD 9.1-RC1
> Cc: <freebsd-scsi at freebsd.org>, <freebsd-stable at freebsd.org>
> 
> I have updated isboot and created 9.1-RC based image.
> Please try it:
> 
> http://www.peach.ne.jp/archives/isboot/isboot-0.2.6.tar.gz
> http://www.peach.ne.jp/archives/isboot/demo/FreeBSD-9.1-RC1-amd64-memstick-isboot-0.2.6.img