Network boot (PXE)

[webattitude]

Hi, I've just read how to Install PINN remotely, and I suggest you could make pxelinux images available along with standard images.
What do you think ?

[procount]

Do you mean a pxe image of PINN, or of the 100+ OSes that it can install?
What would be the use case and benefits of this approach?

[webattitude]

A PXE image of PINN yes, simply to netboot PINN.

[webattitude]

Or else, I'm not sure how to build pxelinux image, according to readme... could you put me in the right direction ?

[procount]

PINN is designed to be a bootloader, so it is expected to be stored locally on the drive and it will then boot one of the installed OSes.
If I understand correctly, a PXE or netboot image will be loaded into RAM from a network source. So it relies on the network always being present to boot PINN. I'm also not sure that netbooting is available on the earlier Pi models before Pi4.
So I don't see much benefit to a pxe image, unless you now otherwise.

[webattitude]

You’re right, it might indeed be useful only for pi4 and newer.
And a network is needed but it’s part of the concept so no subject here.
But anyway, it is useful since it removes the mandatory flashing card step. Which permits easy multi oses tests and other use cases.
I think PINN is multi arch, I mean one image works with many RPi models, but I think a single PXE image would be necessary too. I’m not quite at ease with building os images, but I guess it is a matter of defconfig…

[procount]

I have no idea how to build a pxe image at the moment.

[webattitude]

well, neither do I, but I'm looking for it. And the syslinux package is indeed present in PINN buildroot, so I guess there's not much missing to achieve that, some config variables such as BR2_TARGET_SYSLINUX... still digging