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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

You can netboot a Pi. Every Pi in my house netboots. I have a whole bunch of them. Some play games, some play videos, some play music, and a few other minor things. Because they all netboot, you can change what each one does by renaming a file on the server and then rebooting it. It's great.

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Every new Pi model needs a bit of time for the Netboot firmware to be worked out. I would research the RPi5 before you bought it today.

Are they using like a RAM disk then or are they mapping a network drive for storage while they're running? I've always been curious about setting up netbooting but beyond a failed experiment a long long time ago I haven't really tried.

You made me curious: what do use them for exactly?

One is the "smart" part of my smart TV. One powers my hifi. One connects my non-networked printer to the network.

One is an NTP server which gets the time from GPS, although that one will probably be retired soon, internet time works fine.

I used to have one inside a MAME cabinet but I upgraded it to a "real" PC because the Pi isn't really powerful enough for modern versions of MAME.

What do you use for the smartTV (distro)? And do the big streaming players work happily?

I use LibreELEC. I don't watch streaming TV, I have traditional cable and an HDHomeRun Prime box which acts as a cable-ethernet interface, which Kodi will happily connect to.

What sort of issues do you see from netboot vs. booting of a USB SSD?

Do you have a guide or any tips on how to do this?

It's called PXE boot.

You need a server to host the ISO (via http/ftp/tftp or whatever you prefer) and a DHCP server that will distribute the ISO URI to the client.

Configure the client to boot from the network in the bios and put it in the same LAN as the dhcp server.

That's the gist of it.

Raspberry Pi's don't use PXE boot, they have their own proprietary system. The kernel is fetched by TFTP, along with a config text file which species an NFS location to mount as root. Boot then continues from there.

You can even boot from USB

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