On the brink of insanity, my tattered mind unable to comprehend the twisted interplay of millennia of arcane programmer-time and the ragged screech of madness, I reached into the Mass and steeled myself to the ground lest I be pulled in, and found my magnum opus.
Booting Linux off of a Google Drive root.
Ersei
That’s not… You shouldn’t… Why would…
Oh my God, have mercy on his soul.
But I’m genuinely impressed that there’s a GDrive FUSE good enough for this.
With t title like that I kind of expected to see iPXE for network booting (downloading that initramfs) as well.
“Nobody stopped me, so I kept going.”
THE DEVILS’ HANDS ARE AT WORK HERE
This isn’t “booting Linux off GDrive”, this is “mounting / off GDrive” which is something very different.
* The EFI is (obviously) local to the computer.
* The boot loader is local to the computer (local storage).
* The kernel is loaded from the local computer (local storage).
IOW, you still need storage of some kind in the local computer, which kind of negates all the benefits of network boot setups.
I’ll be impressed when they figure out how to use links to files stored in GDrive to download/load the kernel via iPXE (or similar). That’s “booting Linux off GDrive”.
This project lets you boot kernel images over WAN so combining that with GDrive / gets pretty close.
I’m sure something can be arranged using “coreboot” on a compatible motherboard:
https://www.coreboot.org/
That being said, I would not be using a cloud provider for such a critical piece of infrastructure, without a local backup mechanism.
sukru,
No kidding. I think it was just a joke anyway. It still amazes me how project managers are willing to just give up local control. It seems they all came from the same school of outsourcing everything to “internet clouds”. Obviously this benefits the “cloud” providers, but it came at the expense of local access and control. Sometimes this really irks me since it makes our technology worse and less reliable. Like when I’m sitting in the same room with a printer or smart light bulb, TV streaming device, etc and can’t connect to them directly because they’ve been engineered into the tentacles of some corporation. It’s so objectively stupid for consumer needs, but it creates artificial dependencies which pleases our tech company overlords. The dominant tech companies are all in on it and for better or worse the world’s engineering talent are working to enrich these tech giants maximizing consumer benefit.
Alfman,
The cloud offers a lot of benefits, but at the same time subtly locks you in to proprietary services.
“Nice, I can deploy my custom Linux VM anywhere in world, and fine tune resource needs on the fly!”
“Oh, no! Half of my infrastructure code is AWS scripts, and they have raised prices. I need to learn how to deploy to GCP!”
If there was a common, even if basic, API to use across all providers, that would be a different story. You’d be getting services competing on utility and price without a lockin.
(There seems to be some open source attempts, like this one: https://github.com/multycloud/multy. But I assume you have to factor these in very early in development)
Alfman,
Federated and interoperable internet services that you can shop around for providers are/were great. The obvious problem is that modern cloud services that are explicitly engineered to be vendor locked, which makes them damn awful. The tech giants have specialized at turning everything into a monopolistic land grab for their benefit and not ours. Unfortunately left to their own vices they don’t typically do the right thing (for consumers) on their own. Regulators have step up and force them to open up devices and services to competitors, and even then the may respond with malicious compliance. We’re starting to see some action in the EU, which is something at least. But the stifling effects of vendor locking has been harming consumers for years and years and other countries need to step up. This was never about inherent technical limitations, but profit driven corporations deliberately imposing limitation on our hardware to push their own interests above consumers.
Such is life though. I’ve lost all optimism when it comes to tech giants advancing consumer access/control/portability over technology, it just goes against their DNA.