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Diskomator – NVMe-TCP at your fingertips

by simjue on 11/15/23, 6:35 PM with 77 comments

  • by EvanAnderson on 11/15/23, 10:12 PM

    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).

    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.

  • by anotherhue on 11/15/23, 9:15 PM

    >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.

    Very nice idea.

  • by replete on 11/16/23, 12:45 PM

    Interesting project. Slightly related is Ventoy [0].

    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...

    [0]:https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

  • by mike_d on 11/15/23, 9:18 PM

    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?

    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.

  • by gdgghhhhh on 11/15/23, 11:42 PM

    I don't get it. Isn't this just a live CD that setups nvmt like described here? https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/nvme-over-tcp

  • by gigel82 on 11/16/23, 12:46 AM

    Now we just need a super cheap SBC with tons of PCIe lanes to chuck all those old M.2 drives into.

  • by gorkish on 11/15/23, 9:29 PM

    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.

  • by withinboredom on 11/15/23, 9:23 PM

    I'm looking forward to Longhorn[1] taking advantage of this technology.

    [1]: https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn

  • by londons_explore on 11/15/23, 11:48 PM

    Does NVMe-TCP have any support on Windows?

    Windows supports iSCSI clients/servers... Isn't it easier to emulate that and then you have a much wider range of possible clients?

  • by yencabulator on 11/16/23, 8:24 PM

    The NVMe network server is part of systemd? Umm.. is that really relevant for an init replacement?

    https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

  • by jauntywundrkind on 11/15/23, 11:30 PM

    Can't wait till there's a NVMe-QUIC.

  • by bitinerant on 11/16/23, 10:33 AM

    I'm missing half of the picture. How would one mount a disk on the other end of the TCP connection?

  • by londons_explore on 11/15/23, 11:40 PM

    I think a far smaller version of this could be built on top of UEFI functionality...

    Ie. use UEFI to read/write the disks. UEFI to send/receive packets. UEFI to draw a splash image onto the screen.

    Now, you don't need any network drivers, graphics drivers or disk/controller drivers.

  • by jmprspret on 11/16/23, 7:06 AM

    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

  • by neverartful on 11/16/23, 1:10 AM

    Next thing you know someone is going to want to run a 'disklet' (probably written in Java) within the data path of these devices. Shudder!

  • by Alifatisk on 11/16/23, 11:27 AM

    What’s the idea with the bacteria emoji?

  • by EnigmaCurry on 11/15/23, 9:26 PM

    How does this compare with iSCSI?

  • by askvictor on 11/16/23, 6:58 AM

    Would be nice to add this to Ventoy