Pxe netboot rpi3

maughanorama

Hey all.. not sure if anyone is interested but i have sucessfully pxe boot a rpi3 with the latest retropie.

Rpihas no sdcard or usb. Boots cleanly from tftp and nfs.
If anyones interested i can write a little how to.

Ps it boots a little slower than from local but hey wgo cares right

Febbweiss

@maughanorama I'm interested !! Please a tutorial. Thanks

maughanorama

Ok ill write a long old post in a while... once kids are in bed... pretty simples

maughanorama

Just a quick and dirty post, ill post a more comprehensive post later when i can get on a pc rather than my phone.

Basically download the newest retropie img. Leave that to one side.
On rpi3 use rasbarian latest and upgrade the firmware.. thats the last youll need of that sdcard.
On another pi or pc you need To run up tftp server and nfs shares. I use a rpi1 as my dhcp server with dnsmasq so it only seemed fit to use that as it has tftp built in. You also need to have the dhcp Options
pxe-service=0,"Raspberry Pi Boot"
So now you need to extract the retropie image to two separate filesystems.
Use file to find the start and end points.
Then use dd to extract the filesystems. Mount the first filesystem and copy all the files from that to the tftp root directory or a directy called the serial number of the pi . edit the file cmdline.txt and change the root to the nfs share (that we will create)
Create a empty image file of about 5 gb and append that to the second file system from the retropie image. Then run resize2fs This is because there is no free space on the image once its mounted.
Mount the image file and share it out via nfs. Edit the fstab inside the image and remove everything except /proc line.

Thats it.. working netboot rpi3 with retropie. Now you can netboot rpi1 and rpi2 but you still need bootcode.bin on the sdcard in the pi.

Like i say ill do a proper write up with commands and configurations when im close to a pc ;)

war3zlod3r

@maughanorama did you ever get around to making a detailed write up?