Is the hardware (BIOS/NIC) capable of pulling OSMC from a NAS? Loved that setup using LibreELEC on NanoPCs (x86)…
Cheers,
Robert
You are the first user to request this .
TFTP based booting is indeed possible via U-Boot.
You would then have your filesystem on an NFS share
It depends how much work you want to put in, and how much you think you can benefit from it. The eMMC is quite robust and will definitely be more performant than keeping the root filesystem on a network device.
Sam
It would be interesting to try this and see just what kind of performance hit there is. I’m already set up to do this with my other media players, so I can’t imagine it would be difficult to implement. However I don’t want to make this as a request of the OSMC team if additional work on their part is required - as you say, I’m the first to request information about this.
My router is configured to pass TFTP information to the clients and my NAS runs a TFTP daemon and provides the NFS home drives to the individual clients as their MAC address. It works 100% stable and I’ve never found there to be a performance issue. However my interest in anything more than Blu-ray has been zero. I won’t be interested in 4k anything any time soon.
If you have an overview of what would be needed or can point me to additional information, that would be great. For LibreELEC all I need is to point the client config files at the kernel and Bob’s your mother’s brother…
Cheers,
Robert
x86_x64 is a doddle, ARM’s a bit trickier.
Bootloader supports it however, but you need to be very careful; or you could brick the boot process of the device.
I’d be happy to advise. Please send me a PM. But I’m not happy to post public instructions as it only takes one person to make a mistake and earn themselves an RMA.
You may also want to settle for booting off the SD card (small partition) and the entire root filesystem on NFS. This is completely risk free, and official, not experimental, support already exists in OSMC.
Sam
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Thank you Sam. I would be interested to learn more about booting from the SD card with the file system on NFS, if only to understand the option.
I’ll have to rethink the benefits, if any, of stepping away from the working OSMC systems as they are now. Specifically, what were the reasons I adopted PXE boot previously. Zero requirement for a hard disk or even USB drives, ease of upgrades (just point the configs to a different kernel), easy backups of configs via NAS etc. Stuff to ponder.
Cheers,
Robert
The OSMC installer currently doesn’t expose this functionality for Vero 4K.
But it’s a case of editing a file called preseed.cfg before booting. The target installer would probably need a couple of tweaks too.
If there’s demand for this we can definitely add NFS based booting (with the kernel stored on the SD card).
Sam
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My interest in this dropped to roughly zero. PXE boot was ideal for my previous x86 NanoPCs since due to their low cost and not requiring the added expense of hard disks and not wanting Libre/OpenELEC on potentially failure-prone USB thumb drives. With all their files on NFS shares they were easy to back up and I could point one of them temporarily to new kernel to test upgrades before committing the rest.
The Vero 4k units cost less upfront and have a “hard disk”. They have their own backup facility, and I can test the updates on one before letting the rest update.
Overall, although I really liked the PXE boot scenario for the NanoPCs, I don’t see strong benefits for it with the Vero 4k units. But that’s just me; you may well have something in mind that values the option. I’m certainly curious about the setup and function/performance.
Cheers,
Robert
Over 100Mbps performance could be a little bit troublesome.
If there is more demand I will add support for this.
It may very well also be added for development reasons on our side.
Sam
No