[rwmj]

We've spent a lot of time over the last decade making NBD a faster and better protocol: pipelined requests, full support for trim and zeroing, load balancing over multiple connections, a proper specification, new client and server implementations (libnbd, nbdkit), standard command line tooling, interop testing between all the implementations, and a formal URI specification. It's very trivial to set up an NBD server and there's tons of documentation about how to connect to it with different clients (start here: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit https://libguestfs.org/nbdkit.1.html#SEE-ALSO).

Unfortunately in this specific case (diskless booting) dracut support still sucks, which I really need to get around to fixing at some point.