Ubuntu 20.04 on Rpi 3 - Boot from NFS root [ANSWERED]

[b3lt3r]

Good afternoon

After losing yet another (Raspbian) system to a corrupted SD card I've had enough. I have a system running happily off SSD and that is very straight forward, however, I have decided that for my usage profiles the logical path to take is to boot via NFS mounted root volumes. This seems a *way* more flexible and efficient method to follow. The reason I say this it seems to me that using an SSD requires 1 per Pi which given that the smallest size I can buy now is 120G is horrendously wasteful. It seems to me that if I mount from NFS, I can fit 15 pi root disks on one SSD. Regardless I will explore the theory and see how reliable it is.

Now - on Pi with Raspian I have found 3 different tutorials which are consistent enough that I believe it's clear how to do it - basically mount the root volume on a host and amend 1 line in /boot/cmdline.txt to reference the NFS volume and set IP address.

However, when I search for Ubuntu examples, the answers are more diverse and referring to PXE boot etc. I suspect that it's because the examples are not Pi based. Can someone please confirm if Ubuntu is fundamentally the same as Raspbian in this context? It seems there are similar (ish) boot files in Ubuntu - is that the right direction?

I will crack on with Raspbian anyway, but good to have the option as a couple of things I have are happier on Ubuntu.

TIA

Mike

[ANSWERED] by waveform in #UBUNTU IRC - tl;dr - not currently supported due to u-boot issues. Will proceed with Raspian/ RPOS and see how that goes while waiting for official UB network boot support

Well. It's up finally - pi3 booted new raspian 64 bit on an nfs root. Definitely the way forward so still very much interested in being able to do the same with Ubuntu...

[b3lt3r]

Lol!

Based on what I just read on the 64 bit User land Beta for Raspberry OS, it appears my need for Ubuntu *may* diminish although some apps are either only available or more up to date in the UB repos....

Would still be grateful for a clue on the NFS boot question as I'd expect 64 bit RPOS to take a couple of months at least to settle enough for prod use.

[b3lt3r]

Well.... Ubuntu may not support network boot, but based on another thread about SSD booting here (simple method) I re-tried NFS boot and blow me down it worked a treat....

So - currently have two Pi 3s (one Pi OS 64 bit and one Ubuntu 20.04) booted from NFS mounted root file systems. Both are served from my main Pi4 from an SSD, one is in a discrete partition and the other is just a directory.

Bottom line is I have 2 systems and no need to worry about the SD card going bad without having to use multiple SSDs so this is (in my view) excellent. Only icing on this cake would be to get rid of the need for a /boot on the SD cards but honestly I can live with that for now.