EmuStation frozen with large ~pi on PXE boot

[skiingsean]

Hi all - I have a Pi 3b+ that is successfully booting via PXE (Cisco router for DHCP and boot options / Ubuntu server 18.04 fresh install for NFS & TFTP-HPA) and I can reproduce the issue using both a /mostly/ stock retropie filesystem (4.4-rpi2_rpi3.img) - as well as a modified community image (Gold community edition /or/ RetroRama - from arcadepunks).

For starters, I am completely new to retropie/emulationstation/etc. I've actually spent all my time thus far getting the PXE & Networking issues ironed out. What seems to be the most stable (minus the final problem, why I am here) has been for me to take the stock retropie image and to replace the /opt/retropie from one of the prebuilt images, using retropie update function to install missing dependencies.

All that works fine, and I can play some roms, where things go south is when I try to put in the fairly large ~100Gig /home/pi directory from the prebuilt images. When I do this I can get the controller configuration screen, configure a controller (PS3 or Keyboard) no issue - after that, everything seems frozen. And no, I cannot F4.

However, I can ssh into the rpi and if I watch cat /dev/input/by-id/usb-Dell_Dell_USB_Keyboard-event-kbd I can actually see that input is being received. I thought everything was frozen, but after waking up this AM, I realized it was no longer on ARCADE, but rather VirtualBoy, so it's more of a coma. I can HUP or kill emulationstation from bash which gets me back in control, but if I start estation again, wash/rinse/repeat.

If I go back to the stock ~pi directory, all is fine again . There is nothing in the es_log of value as it seems to stop being written to after controller config, or if I reboot leaving the controller config in place it will throw some warnings about a few missing theme files and that's it.

Looking for any advice or leading questions that might push me in the right direction - or someone who can confirm that NFS mounted, large sized stors do indeed/can indeed, be made to work.

If not, it's not that big of a deal as time available for projects like this is limited and I ordered a few 256G thumb drives as an alternative.

Both machines are wired gig, one switch inbetween. I've been using an SD card with a bootcode.bin on it for console redirection,

however

I just pulled the card and did a PXE boot without any local storage, and now retropie is responding to input!! Albeit, still not working properly, but keyboard and controller can provide navigation (selecting roms and playing don't seem to work, more testing needed).

I'll still post this, as I am hoping to get some input from those of you with more experience on rpi/es - but will also go off and do some more testing/fiddling, in the meantime.

Thx

[mitu]

We don't support 3rd pary/prebuilt images.