Network booting

xanadu

Has anyone tried to boot over the network using tftpboot? I'm new to network booting but I wanted to give it a try while I'm waiting for a new USB flash drive to arrive. I have one of my servers setup to serve installation media over the network, but I'm not sure what needs to be done on the La Frite side to get it going. I've made some progress, and I'm hoping it's just a matter of tweaking some things on the server. 'tftpboot my-tftpserver-ip' connects, but I get a file not found error. I'm just wondering if this will even work before I continue investigating. Maybe there's a better way to do it.

djismgaming

Under u-boot this command will print all variables:

>> printenv

the boot commands are the variables with:

bootcmd_x 

Where "x" is the device to boot. Those are little one line boot scripts inside variables. for instance

bootcmd_usb0

is the one that boots from the USB. There may be one for the network boot I think. I have no PXE experience. Though La Frite will make me learn about it for sure.

esdeber

What I think should be done to get it to network boot with u-boot is to convert the kernel image and initrd to the format u-boot uses, and then get it to load with a u-boot script.

Creating the files with the u-boot-tools (example uses the debian 9 headless image):

mkimage -A arm64 -O linux -C none -T kernel -a 0x01080000 -e 0x01080000 -d vmlinuz-4.19.57+ uImage
mkimage -A arm64 -O linux -T ramdisk -n "initramfs" -C gzip -a 0x13000000 -e 0x13000000 -d initrd.img-4.19.57+ uInitramfs

Load script (substitute your own paths):

tftpboot ${kernel_addr_r} /libreComputer/bank/boot/uImage
tftpboot ${fdt_addr_r} /libreComputer/dtb/libre-computer/aml-s805x-ac/platform.dtb
tftpboot ${ramdisk_addr_r} /libreComputer/bank/boot/uInitramfs
setenv bootargs console=/dev/ttyALM0 ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs rw nfsroot=192.168.123.2:/storage/netboot/libreComputer/bank
bootm ${kernel_addr_r} ${ramdisk_addr_r}:${filesize} ${fdt_addr_r}

On the la Frite load and execute the script with


tftpboot ${scriptaddr} loadScriptLocationOnTFTPSever
source ${scriptaddr}

This does find the kernel and starts to load it, but if fails with a synchronous abort, so something is still missing