Hello everyone, I apologize if my English is not perfect. I would like to ask if you can do the "boot from LAN".
I would like to put the image of "rasbian" on a server and use the raspberry to boot.
Boot from LAN
5 posts
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Thu Nov 01, 2012 6:10 pm
As always, the caveat is that you have to boot from the SD card - that's the only way the Pi can be booted. But the "rootfs" can be someplace other than the SD card - say, on USB or on NFS.
Look for a thread with the title: NFS root - totes worth it
That seems to have the latest skinny on the subject.
Look for a thread with the title: NFS root - totes worth it
That seems to have the latest skinny on the subject.
- Posts: 1387
- Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2012 1:11 pm
Have a look at etherboot
http://etherboot.org/wiki/start
http://etherboot.org/wiki/start
- Posts: 23
- Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:28 am
Etherboot won't work, don't even get your hopes up.
Currentely, and for the forseeable future, you CAN NOT boot from anything other than the SD card. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it's pretty damn close.
The reason is that, the GPU is what actually boots the system. When it does that the only device it can access is the SD card. It can't see the network as that would require a) it knew how to even talk to ta network chip, b) that the network chip supported something like PXE or another network booting technology, and the biggest one c) that the CPU knew how to communicate over the USB bus which, at this point isn't even initialized and which the network card is at the other end of.
Now, all that said, that's not to say you won't be able to boot the just kernel from the SD card and run the rest of the system from an NFS share, but that's not network booting.
Currentely, and for the forseeable future, you CAN NOT boot from anything other than the SD card. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it's pretty damn close.
The reason is that, the GPU is what actually boots the system. When it does that the only device it can access is the SD card. It can't see the network as that would require a) it knew how to even talk to ta network chip, b) that the network chip supported something like PXE or another network booting technology, and the biggest one c) that the CPU knew how to communicate over the USB bus which, at this point isn't even initialized and which the network card is at the other end of.
Now, all that said, that's not to say you won't be able to boot the just kernel from the SD card and run the rest of the system from an NFS share, but that's not network booting.
- Posts: 142
- Joined: Sun Jun 10, 2012 8:27 pm
Right. Like I said in the first response.
However, if you want to talk semantics, you could argue that no computer (but for the sake of argument, let's focus on typical x86 hardware) actually boots from the network (or hard disk or floppy or ...). x86 machines all boot from the BIOS. What happens after that is, well, you know...
I.e., and what I'm saying, in a roundabout way, is that when you "boot from the network" on an x86 box, you're only able to do that because the BIOS has PXE support. And since the software on the SD card (on ther Pi) is the counterpart of the BIOS (on x86), it then follows that it is equally correct to say that you can "boot from the network" (on either platform).
However, if you want to talk semantics, you could argue that no computer (but for the sake of argument, let's focus on typical x86 hardware) actually boots from the network (or hard disk or floppy or ...). x86 machines all boot from the BIOS. What happens after that is, well, you know...
I.e., and what I'm saying, in a roundabout way, is that when you "boot from the network" on an x86 box, you're only able to do that because the BIOS has PXE support. And since the software on the SD card (on ther Pi) is the counterpart of the BIOS (on x86), it then follows that it is equally correct to say that you can "boot from the network" (on either platform).
- Posts: 1387
- Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2012 1:11 pm