This is the third part of my Pi netboot series. You can find an overview and links to the other parts in the Pi netboot series overview article. This, to me, is the most interesting article of the entire netboot Pi series. When I started with setting up netbooting, I had no idea how it would work. I had a vague idea that there was a kernel command line parameter, but no idea where it was interpreted....
In this article, I will provide an overview of how netbooting with the Raspberry Pi 4 works and how to configure a server off of which you can boot your Pi. Several components are needed for netbooting a Pi: The Pi itself needs to have netbooting in its boot order config A DHCP server is needed to provide IPs for the Pi and the TFTP server. In this series, the IP for the Pi will be provided by my OPNsense firewall and the netboot options will be provided by DNSmasq....
In this multipart series, I will be detailing how I set up a Raspberry Pi 4 to netboot, with no local SD card/eMMC/other storage required. The setup will use Ceph to provide both, NFS storage for the /boot partition, and an RBD volume for the root disk. For the PXE netboot itself, DNSmasq will be used. Part II: The Netboot Server Part III: Telling Linux Where to Boot From Part IV: Using Packer and Ansible to create a Raspberry Pi Ubuntu Netboot Image Part V: Ansible Playook Part VI: Conclusion Why though?...