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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

#141

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.

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

100mbit is similar to a slow sd card or usb stick anyway?

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#142
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.

pihole works really well for me as a LAN-wide ad blocker.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

10 ms is fine. 100ms works but you get odd echoes like a speaker system in a big building.

You need some way to compensate for clock drift between different playback devices. Even good clocks will drift 10ms in a few hours.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

At most 10ms. Sub 1ms would be awesome.

And yes, definitely. If you can build in a “chromecast receiver” so that a user could cast to multiple synced speakers (at full quality), you’d definitely have my attention

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#145
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine having to sysadmin a bunch of raspberry pis in a serious "production" setting with all the reliability problems they have, that would be godawful, you'd go through a brace of SD cards every month

Why? I supported 40 of them (rpi 3) as remote serial hosts and custom reboot/repower for a QA farm. Not a single one failed and don't think I had a single issue during that whole time. As far as I know it's still going just fine. It was a cheap and dependable solution. 99% of the SD card issues go away when you don't cheap out and don't go cheap. get a large card that is 32GB plus from a respectable vendor. That's no…

It is the fault of Pi hardware when it still refuses to provide a hardware shutdown button for proper file system unmounts, after all these years.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#146

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.

Yes, TFTP for the boot rom, and then NFS for the root fs. I don't use docker or any other kind of container system because it's so easy to just reboot a Pi into a new OS on demand. Everything runs natively.

That's what we did when developing our original Embedded Linux stuff. Once you get it working it's really nice. You have your standard tools, version control, etc running locally on your system.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#147
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to support proper open source development ... buy Beagle board and other alternatives. What more open alternatives are there with similar price and performance? The Beagleboards are ridiculously underpowered compared to a Raspberry Pi 4. I like the ODROIDs but I don't think they're any more open than Raspberry Pi. They also tend to be more expensive. YMMV on all of this stuff: * Some folks are doing mic…

Orange Pi looks pretty good

And Banana Pi, better designed hardware. Lots of alternatives.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#148

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?

If you just want to prevent other users from snooping you, use VLAN.

There's no protection against the network administrators though.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I supported 40 of them (rpi 3) as remote serial hosts and custom reboot/repower for a QA farm. Not a single one failed and don't think I had a single issue during that whole time. As far as I know it's still going just fine. It was a cheap and dependable solution. 99% of the SD card issues go away when you don't cheap out and don't go cheap. get a large card that is 32GB plus from a respectable vendor. That's no…

It is the fault of Pi hardware when it still refuses to provide a hardware shutdown button for proper file system unmounts, after all these years.

Dependence on SD Cards and lack of orderly shutdown was what caused my company to not go with the Raspberry Pi. Even then we have back up power to allow the system time to shutdown.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#150

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…

"Position in the market"? Broadcom makes STB chips that trivially dwarf all the shipped Pis. Heck, the first Pi was based on a bunch of chips from an aborted project. The RPi folks are, unfortunately, lucky that Broadcom even gives them the time of day.

Not that I disagree with your overall statement -- certainly I've found myself explaining to folks in a commercial setting that while Raspberry Pi might be a great way to a quick prototype, you're going to need to reimplement against some other hardware. Really what you're getting with the R-Pi is the community that goes with it, who have so far been very loyal to that series of devices.

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