Netbooting OSMC on RPi2? (UBOOT+DHCP+TFTP+NFS)

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hi, I am trying to netboot OSMC/RPi2 from NFS/ubuntu server. My end goal is to boot and run multiple RPis off the server storage and never touch the SD cards again.

So far I have installed UBOOT on RPi SD and configured DHCP+TFTP on server to deliver a UBOOT script. My UBOOT script then downloads the OSMC kernel from the TFTP server and starts it. This all works fine…

The problem at the moment is that OSMC seems to be ignoring the nfs root options and trying to boot from MMC. The serial console shows:-

Linux version 3.18.13 (root@compiler1) (gcc version 4.7.3 (Buildroot 2014.05-gc065b36) ) #2 SMP PREEMPT Sat Jan 30 04:00:15 GMT 2016
...
Kernel command line: loglevel=8 console=ttyAMA0 ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.0.10:/nfs-exports/net-boot/rpi/osmc osmcdev=rbp2
...
"Thu Jan 1 00:00:16 1970"   "Starting OSMC installer" 
"Thu Jan 1 00:00:24 1970"   "Detecting device we are running on" 
"Thu Jan 1 00:00:24 1970"   "Mounting boot filesystem" 
"Thu Jan 1 00:00:24 1970"   "Trying to mount to MNT_BOOT (/mnt/boot)" 
"Thu Jan 1 00:00:24 1970"   "Using device->boot: /dev/mmcblk0p1 and FS: fat32" 
"Thu Jan 1 00:00:24 1970"   "Halting Install. Error message was: no filesystem found"

Any suggestions what UBOOT/command line options I could try next?

Thanks.

2

Not possible yet. I don’t have plans to add U-Boot support for Pi

For now use OSMC’s official NFS method

Sam

3

(Wow! 2 minute turnaround! Fantastic!)

  1. Is there an official description of OSMC’s official NFS method? - a quick wgrep hasn’t found it for me.

  2. Naive question: Why does OSMC need to support UBOOT? Once UBOOT transfers control to the kernel isn’t it irrelevant?

4

Use the OSMC installer and you can pressed NFS. I haven’t documented it much

OSMC needs to be aware of U-Boot to know how to handle updates

Sam

5

Would love a netboot + nfs storage version of OSMC as well. My SDCard recently croaked, so now I’m looking for a completely SDCard free solution. Aside from running Kodi on Raspbian, OpenElec seems to be the only one officially supporting this setup.

https://openelec.tv/documentation/installing-openelec/network-boot-nfs

6

OSMC supports NFS booting if you configure it via the installer.
You could go completely SDless with TFTP if you have a Pi3 or later.

Sam