- This can be used for stations with low disk space (or even diskless -
- if you boot from floppy) to borrow disk space from another computer.
- Unlike NFS, it is possible to put any filesystem on it, etc. It should
- even be possible to use NBD as a root filesystem (I've never tried),
- but it requires a user-level program to be in the initrd to start.
- It also allows you to run block-device in user land (making server
- and client physically the same computer, communicating using loopback).
-
- Current state: It currently works. Network block device is stable.
- I originally thought that it was impossible to swap over TCP. It
- turned out not to be true - swapping over TCP now works and seems
- to be deadlock-free, but it requires heavy patches into Linux's
- network layer.
-
+ This can be used for stations with low disk space (or even diskless)
+ to borrow disk space from another computer.
+ Unlike NFS, it is possible to put any filesystem on it, etc.
+