Re: Booting Live-ISO over PXE+HTTP using Grub loopback

[Michal Suchanek <hramrach@gmail.com>]

On 16 February 2015 at 13:49, Beeblebrox <zaphod@berentweb.com> wrote:
>
>> a Debian 7.8 LXDE live iso does not contain httpfs so will not run
>> directly from web server but might run from memory using wget.
>
> This comment made me reconsider. Since I am more interested in the "broadest possible solution", this suggestion perhaps makes more sense. The flag is fetch however. Anyway, I just got the older Gparted iso to boot:
> menuentry 'Gparted i386'  --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
>   set root="http,192.168.2.100"
>   set isofile="gparted-live-0.19.0-beta1-3-i486.iso"
>   loopback loop0 ($root)$isofile
>   linux (loop0)/live/vmlinuz boot=live config noswap noprompt verbose noeject fetch=http://192.168.2.100/gparted-live-0.19.0-beta1-3-i486.iso
>   initrd (loop0)/live/initrd.img  }
>
> These were removed, since the ISO boots witout them:
> # toram=filesystem.squashfs fromiso=gparted-live-0.19.0-beta1-3-i486.iso
> Total memory resource used is 480k.
> Just to confirm I have this figured out correctly: It's not possible to partially load a live-CD.iso with the PXE method, unless using NFS or other block device. In absence of NFS/cifs or such, the entire iso must be loaded into RAM. Am I correct with this statement?

It generally depends on the options the iso builder enabled. In the
general case loading whole iso in ram is most likely going to work if
you have enough ram because this option uses only packages that are
usually installed on any iso.

HTH

Michal