Yet another win for Systemd.
Soon we’ll be debating whether we call it systemd/linux or gnu/systemd.
Red Hat: “we put the D in your System”
Target disk mode is fantastic, I’m thrilled to see this coming to Linux
Worked in IT, target disk mode is a life saver when you have to recover data from a laptop with a broken screen/keyboard/bad ribbon cable and don’t want to take apart something held together by glue.
Can someone eli5 pls?
“target disk mode”, which this claims to be taking a lot of inspiration from, pretty much turns your computer into an external harddrive - so you can connect another machine to it for direct access. This appears to be trying to accomplish the same, but over the network.
If you’ve ever stuffed up a machine so badly that the best idea you could come up with, was to take the harddrive out and work on it from another machine - this pretty much allows you to do that. But instead of taking the drive out and putting it an external drive enclosure, you just ask the stuffed up machine to act as the external drive enclosure.
Great answer
Oh okay. Thanks for the simple explanation :)
same, i have no idea what any of that means and i use runit
runit gang !
Oh, another arm growing.
This seems like a win for almost all distros
Yay, yet another storage protocol over the network.
Link to the post (for accessibility and follow-up in the thread): https://mastodon.social/@pid_eins/111324093735348164
Pull request: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/29748
So this is a service aimed at exposing disks as nvme-tcp boot targets on boot of the system? I mean I love it, I wonder if this could be used to help with a chicken and egg problem I’ve had with building clustered systems easier. So far I either need a running service to host a network file system (like NFS or CEPH), or I need local disks that bootstrap the clustered storage environment.
Is this like booting over pxe? Is nvme tcp widely supported on motherboards?
No, this has nothing to do with your motherboard. Once you reach the boot menu you’ll be able to pick your OS and alternatively
systemd-storagetm
. If you chose the the latter then your disks will be available to other machines over NVME-TCP. Just like Apple.So when it’s booted it will just advertise the storage to the LAN over nvme-tcp protocol?
Not “booted”, you won’t be booting your full OS. It’s just an option on the boot menu that launches systemd and a small program that does the magic and nothing else.
But is it running at the same time as a an OS or is it just a device without an OS running, sharing storage?
So share drive / simplified NAS, no?
Kind of… but you’re directly accessing the hard drive like iSCSI does. Way less latency, no high (and slow) protocols like SMB are used.
NVMe/TCP is an extension of the NVMe base specification that defines the binding of the NVMe protocol to message-based fabrics using TCP. The rules for mapping NVMe queues, creation of NVMe-oF capsules, and the methods used to deliver the capsules over the TCP fabric are described in the NVMe/TCP Transport Specification. By binding the NVMe protocol to TCP, NVMe/TCP enables the efficient end-to-end transfer of commands and data between NVMe-oF hosts and NVMe-oF controller devices by any standard Ethernet-based TCP/IP networks. Large-scale data centers can use their existing Ethernet-based network infrastructure with multilayered switch topologies and traditional network adapters
- https://infohub.delltechnologies.com/l/nvme-nvme-tcp-and-dell-smartfabric-storage-software-overview-ip-san-solution-primer-1/what-is-nvme-tcp/
- https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/March-2019-NVMe-TCP-What-You-Need-to-Know-About-the-Specification.pdf
- https://nvmexpress.org/answering-your-questions-nvme-tcp-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-specification-webcast-qa/
SAN. Not NAS.
So NAS without any controls. Yay?
trivial to set up NAS with minimal overhead, plus you can boot any pc into this once it’s standard, which would be nice for rescuing when you fuck something up: rather than fiddle around with rescue mode or digging out the drives you just boot into this mode and access the drives from your laptop or whatever.
Not compelling to me. Gonna stick with runit and/or s6 on my Artix Linux systems at home. But you do you Lennart.
Same for me, but dinit
And why would this need systemd of all things? Should basically be doable over something like SSH / TFTP, right?