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Network boot (PXE)

Open webattitude opened this issue 2 months ago • 7 comments

Hi, I've just read how to Install PINN remotely, and I suggest you could make pxelinux images available along with standard images. What do you think ?

webattitude avatar Oct 27 '25 18:10 webattitude

Do you mean a pxe image of PINN, or of the 100+ OSes that it can install? What would be the use case and benefits of this approach?

procount avatar Oct 28 '25 10:10 procount

A PXE image of PINN yes, simply to netboot PINN.

webattitude avatar Oct 29 '25 12:10 webattitude

Or else, I'm not sure how to build pxelinux image, according to readme... could you put me in the right direction ?

webattitude avatar Oct 29 '25 15:10 webattitude

PINN is designed to be a bootloader, so it is expected to be stored locally on the drive and it will then boot one of the installed OSes. If I understand correctly, a PXE or netboot image will be loaded into RAM from a network source. So it relies on the network always being present to boot PINN. I'm also not sure that netbooting is available on the earlier Pi models before Pi4. So I don't see much benefit to a pxe image, unless you now otherwise.

procount avatar Oct 29 '25 17:10 procount

You’re right, it might indeed be useful only for pi4 and newer. And a network is needed but it’s part of the concept so no subject here. But anyway, it is useful since it removes the mandatory flashing card step. Which permits easy multi oses tests and other use cases. I think PINN is multi arch, I mean one image works with many RPi models, but I think a single PXE image would be necessary too. I’m not quite at ease with building os images, but I guess it is a matter of defconfig…

webattitude avatar Oct 30 '25 09:10 webattitude

I have no idea how to build a pxe image at the moment.

procount avatar Oct 30 '25 09:10 procount

well, neither do I, but I'm looking for it. And the syslinux package is indeed present in PINN buildroot, so I guess there's not much missing to achieve that, some config variables such as BR2_TARGET_SYSLINUX... still digging

webattitude avatar Oct 30 '25 13:10 webattitude