This is a followup to the qemu with PXE boot post I wrote a few years back. In this post I will cover the creation of a live filesystem using livemedia-creator, and PXE booting it with qemu and UEFI. I am assuming that you have some familiarity with using Anaconda to install Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As well as with my previous posts about livemedia-creator .
Building the image with livemedia-creator The creation process is similar to creating live isos but instead of an iso we will create the live root filesystem.
I was expecting to spend the whole afternoon getting a tftp server setup so I could PXE boot some qemu virtual machines for testing. I wanted to make sure it didn’t interfere with anything else on the LAN so it would have to be limited to the user mode network I use with my vms. Typically when I try to do something like this I end up trying a bunch of different things that don’t quite work right.
I've been a VMWare Workstation user for years and have generally been pretty happy with it; but it is significantly slower than bare metal, especially when it comes to disk i/o. One of my responsibilities for work is creating and maintaining a custom Fedora distribution. This requires building new rpm packages and then creating a livecd iso for the install of the system. Lots of disk i/o involved in reading and creating the disk image meant that I was running Fedora9 as my native desktop.