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Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

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Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#131
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually tried this and it turned out to be quite a bit more complicated than predicted, due to clocks on the pis being slightly different "I'll just sling udp multicast of the PCM samples around the network, can't be that hard right?" ended up using MPD with pulseaudio over TCP, and they get out of sync after a few minutes, but good enough

The different clocks is a real hurdle. I have to give credit to Apple on this one, as they had the genius idea to make the buffer >1s, and send control messages independent of the audio stream. There’s gotta be a way to do it with PTP and the same ideas but clearly it’s either an extremely difficult problem, too niche, or both.

What is the requirement for synched audio? milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds,...

I'm currently working on devices that synchronises themselves wirelessly indoor over a large area and I'm now wondering if music could be an application I haven't though about...

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#132
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pi doesn't use PXE. It's different, but documented here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

You probably should read that link, section "DHCP Request / Reply". Virtually the entire world uses PXE. Anyway, I find it funny that we are arguing about the proper name for network boot in a thread about usb boot.

OK sure. :) I guess what I meant was, if you're setup for booting Pis, you can't also boot arbitrary PCs without extra work.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#133
post #56

Not a fan of Raspberry Pi. It hides behind proprietary Broadcom chip, no DSI/MIPI support and you're at the mercy of Raspberry PI for any sort of commercial implementation (RPi Zero and independent module). They do guarantee upto 2026 availability for their DIMM modules which is nice. We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature. What they should do is to leverage their po…

Largely agreed. There's been some very dedicated people open sourcing support for RPi pieces, which is amazing to see, but it's been herculean efforts over many years with seemingly no support. This is unfortunate & sad, but at least things have been moving forward. The much sadder story is wifi routers. OpenWRT used to have pretty broad support for a wide range of routers, but there have been less & less people maki…

You're not wrong. 10 years ago I had openwrt everywhere. Now I run unifi. Very happy with it (though I wish they'd release that WiFi 6 ap they have in beta) but yeah I don't have control at that level anymore.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#134

Best decision I ever made was setting up a Pi netboot server on my LAN. Now I have a whole bunch of Pi 3's and 4's scattered around my home with no local storage at all doing cool things, and I can make them boot into a completely different OS just by renaming a symlink on the server.

Can you host the netboot server from a workstation by chance? This is something I had never considered and it would really change things up for me, how does that even work? Is it just an installed distro or just a network image on the device it's booting from? I'm somewhat familiar with netbooting an installer but I've never setup a server just used the tech to install an OS from the network to hardware.

I did bump into these docs:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

Are these the gist of it, or did you do a little more?

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other commenters in this thread have mentioned netbooting their Pis to avoid that exact issue. A typical USB flash device won't be any more reliable than an SD card, though it might be better cooled.

> A typical USB flash device won't be any more reliable than an SD card, though it might be better cooled. That’s not strictly true, as the USB storage controller abstracts away the NAND and can manage wear leveling and free blocks. There are also more “enterprise class” USB sticks than SD cards, and the USB3 interface to USB drives is much faster than pretty much any SD card interface. Best SD cards and best USB dri…

Can confirm the read only. Indeed had it with 2 cards now. It's really annoying because the OS still caches writes in RAM so you only find out when you reboot and all your changes are lost.

Still, not quite as bad as completely corrupting I suppose...

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#136

Best decision I ever made was setting up a Pi netboot server on my LAN. Now I have a whole bunch of Pi 3's and 4's scattered around my home with no local storage at all doing cool things, and I can make them boot into a completely different OS just by renaming a symlink on the server.

Can you host the netboot server from a workstation by chance? This is something I had never considered and it would really change things up for me, how does that even work? Is it just an installed distro or just a network image on the device it's booting from? I'm somewhat familiar with netbooting an installer but I've never setup a server just used the tech to install an OS from the network to hardware. I did bump i…

Well, that's instructions on how to setup a Pi itself to be the netboot server. That will work fine, but your DHCP server still needs to be configurable to emit the correct responses to find the TFTP server, if you don't want to use a Pi itself as your DHCP server, which I would imagine most people don't.

My DHCP server is pfSense, and I'm using a FreeNAS server as the TFTP/NFS server.

The Pi netboot procedure is documented in more general terms, here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using for a filesystem? NFS? My worry would be saturating the older 100Mbit connections when downloading things like docker images.

The Pi4 can do 300-350mbps, which is faster than most people's internet connection.

Actually, just tested on my local network, got ~940 Mbps sending and receiving. Pi4 has real Gbit now, not limited by the USB bandwidth any more.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#138

Best decision I ever made was setting up a Pi netboot server on my LAN. Now I have a whole bunch of Pi 3's and 4's scattered around my home with no local storage at all doing cool things, and I can make them boot into a completely different OS just by renaming a symlink on the server.

Whaty the best way to do this without trusting the untrusted LAN?

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#140
post #37

Best decision I ever made was setting up a Pi netboot server on my LAN. Now I have a whole bunch of Pi 3's and 4's scattered around my home with no local storage at all doing cool things, and I can make them boot into a completely different OS just by renaming a symlink on the server.

> Now I have a whole bunch of Pi 3's and 4's scattered around my home with no local storage at all doing cool things Elaborate? I have a single pi3 as a Plex server, looking for more ideas.

Not related to the rest of the thread, but this popped up the other week and, honestly to my shock, worked well on my Pi3.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441112

You may or may not get some latency with video. Seemed to vary for me.

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