netroot is a package of utilities for network root file systems. It was designed for the TOSS Linux distribution for clusters, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but will work with other Red Hat Enterprise Linux derived distros.
netroot distinguishes itself from other tools for managing diskless
clusters by restricting itself to things that can be done by a package
installed within the root image, namely /boot management and dracut
modules. It does not concern itself with other aspects such as
server-side setup and configuration management. This minimalist design
is intended for sites (like ours) that already have procedures and
techniques in place for managing these subsystems and want a focused
diskless solution.
Please open any issues in the netroot github issue tracker.
netroot is derived from the nfsroot
project. In RHEL 7, decent stateless root support made nfsroot
unnecessary to support root over NFS; however we wanted to experiment with
root over 9nbd, and retain the
rather handy configpxe scripts for managing pxelinux.conf
within the root image.
Hence netroot is a stripped down and renamed version of nfsroot, ported to RHEL 7.