Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI & PXE

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Motivation #

I wanted to test out the new Unsloth models for Qwen3.6 and Gemma4 on my gaming PC. llama.cpp on Windows is tedious to compile, and I have littered my Windows installation with too many toolchains already. Python venvs, Mingw, Cuda, UCRT64 & WSL to name a few. Windows still does not feel developer friendly to me. I think I’m ok with it being a frontend for Steam’s Big Picture mode.
I didn’t want to disturb my Windows setup that I use for gaming. Windows has a nasty habit of breaking GRUB on updates. UEFI fixes that to some extent, but it’s a pain to maintain the UEFI entries manually and change them every time the kernel updates. One of the best benefits of using the method described here is that GRUB is also on the remote drive.
I have a couple of NVME drives in the PC, both contain a few games that I play frequently. I didn’t want to get into the hassle of repartitioning everything that the boot loader works with both Linux & Windows.
Sure I can use a USB drive and in the past I have done so, but I tend to misplace my USB drives everywhere and when I urgently need one, I tend to pick the USB that’s readily available e.g. for some FedEx printing or as backup drive for photos when on vacation. I end up wiping the Linux USBs more often than not. I already have a NAS, so why not use remote boot ?
I always wanted to know how PXE worked over iSCSI.

Limitations #

Installing Debian on a network drive will indeed be noticeably slower than a native install. Since I’m going to use some portion of my local NVMe drive to store & load the models, I didn’t really care about the OS performance as I have enough RAM to run everything smoothly once the OS has booted up. I won’t be using this for browsing stuff using Firefox.

Iscsi on Syncopated Pandemonium

Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI & PXE

Motivation #

Limitations #