Hi! We've tried to use network boot loading kernel and initramfs with http but we found this to be terribly slow. Our ~400Mb initramfs was loaded more then hour on 10Gbit/s network!
Googling around best I found was this redhat notice:
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1262653 (Installing RHEL 7 with GRUB2 HTTP is very slow or timeouts.) Although it is written there that: "It's a known issue that in heavy network traffic. The GRUB2 HTTP protocol is very slow and risks timeout failures.", I failed to find any bugreport on that. The best I found is the following bug report:
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?49531 but as far as I understand this should not cause such dramatic slowdown in single http connection.
So is this really known? What causes this? Are there any workarounds?
Relevant part of our configuration:
insmod http
set root='(http)'
menuentry 'Gentoo Linux' {
linux /kernel
initrd /initramfs
}
--
Peter.