I never really used Mac machines, but I always appreciated "target disk mode". This sounds similar, albeit over a network (which could simply be a straight-thru cable between Ethernet NICs on two machines).<p>Edit: Yeah. I forgot about actually saying what "target disk mode was". There's a child post that mentions it, so I'll refrain. I will say that I saw it used in imaging computers in a college computer lab setting back in the early 2000's. I definitely wished my PCs could've done it. It looked like a very handy feature. Presumably it would make fixing OS boot issues easier, as well as just harvesting files off a machine that was otherwise not operating properly due to OS issues.
>I'd like to live to see a future where people build appliances like this for various purposes, not just this specific NVMe one. For example, a nice thing to have would be an appliance whose only job is to make all local displays available via Miracast. I hope this repository is inspiration enough for an interested soul, to get this off the ground.<p>Very nice idea.
Interesting project. Slightly related is Ventoy [0].<p>Install Ventoy onto a USB disk drive and it will create a bootable partition that can mount your Ibootable images (including ISOs) onto your baremetal from the second partition it creates. In effect you can just load up a USB drive with ISOs and install onto baremetal from them. Super handy for distro hoppers and appealing if you don't want to fart around with network boot but just want to install something on a computer. I was trying to install Windows 11 and just wondered if there was an EFI thing that could just mount my USB, and Ventoy exists and works pretty well. I actually couldn't install windows without it on one system, just didn't like something about my installer media...<p>[0]:<a href="https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html</a>
I seem to recall an announcement from Western Digital(?) years ago about a line of hard drives with a direct ethernet interface. Does anyone remember the same or what might have come of it?<p>The market is saturated with solutions for middle-boxes that make hard drives talk to networks, but nobody seems to be directly addressing the problem of we just want storage network accessible.
I don't get it. Isn't this just a live CD that setups nvmt like described here?
<a href="https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/nvme-over-tcp" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/nvme-over-tcp</a>
This is awesome. Would be exciting if it can be extended to support NVMe-oF as well with RDMA via RoCEv2. A SBC running something like this with at least 2x10GbE and two M.2 slots and 2 sata ports would be an absolute dream device for me.
I'm looking forward to Longhorn[1] taking advantage of this technology.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn">https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn</a>
Does NVMe-TCP have any support on Windows?<p>Windows supports iSCSI clients/servers... Isn't it easier to emulate that and then you have a much wider range of possible clients?
The NVMe network server is part of systemd? Umm.. is that really relevant for an init replacement?<p><a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-storagetm.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...</a>
I think a far smaller version of this could be built on top of UEFI functionality...<p>Ie. use UEFI to read/write the disks. UEFI to send/receive packets. UEFI to draw a splash image onto the screen.<p>Now, you don't need any network drivers, graphics drivers or disk/controller drivers.
Very personal opinion, but I think the image is overcomplicated. Fedora base + systemd + sshd + application? This can surely be smushed down to being a go-krazy image. I guess then, you'd have to rewrite in go, and device support would be an issue