Systemd Working On "Storage Target Mode" Feature - Inspired By Apple macOS

Yet another win for Systemd.

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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 !
  
  From what I understand it's basically like a "thin client" type of thing where the client loads the Kernel from local storage up to a certain point and then boots into a rootfs that is somewhere else on a remote server.
  
  Kinda like pxe boot?
  
  Basically, your system, if asked to, will boot into a limited mode where it exposes its drives over NVMe-TCP. It's like taking the hard drive out and putting it into a different PC, but over the network.
  
  Similar but in this case the Linux Kernel/Init System act as the PXE firmware so you don't need a TFTP Server to load initramfs and a Kernel image. And you don't need a NFS or Samba server because the Server has the drive with the rootfs already exposed to the network.

65 comments