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Indeed, it seems iVentoy uses NBD to present block storage devices (eg: ISOs) to the DHCP client. I just installed iVentoy 1.0.08 in my lab on a Debian 12 VM (

by rtp4me 3y ago

Indeed, it seems iVentoy uses NBD to present block storage devices (eg: ISOs) to the DHCP client. I just installed iVentoy 1.0.08 in my lab on a Debian 12 VM (via VMware 8 server). From there, I created a new VM and booted Linux Mint 21.1 via UEFI boot. Linux Mint install went well with no noticeable issues. Overall, first impressions are looking good. Found a few bugs that need to get worked out including: * UEFi boot requires iVentoy to have 2 vCPUs (see forums) * Restarting the iVentoy script resets the IP Boot config (specifically the Subnet Mask and Gateway) From their release page, iVentoy supports a bunch of Linux and Windows install images, and you can even inject custom auto-install scripts to the ISO for unattended installs. Very cool. Finally, the iVentoy discussion forum seems very active, and the developer seems engaged. I will probably support the developer ($49) because he was able to leverage NBD to overcome some iPXE issues I struggled with for a long time. I know how much time/effort goes into making iPXE booting look seamless. Kudos to him/her/them

jwiz 3y ago
So, it loads some kind of shim that presents as a BIOS optical drive, but reads its data via NBD? Then, say, the linux kernel of the vanilla ISO installer sees that shim program as a sort of virtual cdrom? When you installed Mint, did you happen to notice from where the installer thought it was reading the files?
jwiz 3y ago
It seems to be hot-patching the image to redirect the kernel command line to boot from the iventoy server. I booted ubuntu-22.04.2-live-server-amd64.iso and the resulting kernel command line of the installation environment has a "url" argument that points at the iventoy server URL for the iso image. I was not able to directly boot a homegrown Debian live ISO image, so I think they just have a broad set of specific ISOs that work with iVentoy. It's not a generic "boot any ISO" solution.

by rtp4me 3y ago

jwiz 3y ago

So, it loads some kind of shim that presents as a BIOS optical drive, but reads its data via NBD? Then, say, the linux kernel of the vanilla ISO installer sees that shim program as a sort of virtual cdrom? When you installed Mint, did you happen to notice from where the installer thought it was reading the files?

jwiz 3y ago

It seems to be hot-patching the image to redirect the kernel command line to boot from the iventoy server. I booted ubuntu-22.04.2-live-server-amd64.iso and the resulting kernel command line of the installation environment has a "url" argument that points at the iventoy server URL for the iso image. I was not able to directly boot a homegrown Debian live ISO image, so I think they just have a broad set of specific ISOs that work with iVentoy. It's not a generic "boot any ISO" solution.