Raspberry Pi OS¶

Basic installation instructions for netbooting Raspberry Pi clients from a Raspberry Pi OS (formely Raspbian) chroot on an LTSP server.

Prerequisites¶

The LTSP server should already be configured by following the installation page. If booting x86 clients is also required, do that part first as it's easier.

Client configuration¶

The client configuration is officially documented here. In short:

To netboot Pi 2, format an SD card with the fat file system and put only bootcode.bin in it. This file can be found in /boot/bootcode.bin inside your Raspberry Pi OS image.
For Pi 3B, boot from an SD card, run echo program_usb_boot_mode=1 | sudo tee -a /boot/config.txt and reboot.
Pi 3B+ supports netbooting out of the box.
For Pi 4 and Pi 400, boot from a fully updated SD card to get the latest firmware, then run sudo raspi-config and select Advanced Options > Boot Order > Network Boot.

Chroot preparation¶

Raspberry Pi OS is very optimized for Raspberries, so it's currently a better option than e.g. Ubuntu MATE or other distributions. The easiest way to generate a Raspberry Pi OS chroot isn't with the debootstrap command, but by downloading an image. You may also follow the Raspberry Pi OS installation guide or you may use dd to read the SD card from an existing Raspberry Pi installation; to keep the instructions shorter, we assume that in the end you have an uncompressed raspios.img on the LTSP server.

losetup -rP /dev/loop8 2020-12-02-raspios-buster-armhf-full.img
mount -o ro /dev/loop8p2 /mnt
time cp -a /mnt/. /srv/ltsp/raspios
umount /mnt
mount -o ro /dev/loop8p1 /mnt
cp -a /mnt/. /srv/ltsp/raspios/boot/
umount /mnt
losetup -d /dev/loop8

At this point, Raspberry Pi OS should be in /srv/ltsp/raspios. This chroot isn't ready for netbooting yet, the following commands are needed:

# Go to the chroot in order to use relative directories
cd /srv/ltsp/raspios
# Mask services that we don't want in netbooting
systemctl mask --root=. dhcpcd dphys-swapfile raspi-config resize2fs_once
# Remove SD card entries from fstab
echo 'proc            /proc           proc    defaults          0       0' >./etc/fstab
# Use an appropriate cmdline for NFS_RW netbooting
echo 'ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs rw nfsroot=192.168.67.1:/srv/ltsp/raspios,vers=3,tcp,nolock console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles modprobe.blacklist=bcm2835_v4l2' >./boot/cmdline.txt

Server preparation¶

In ltsp.conf, set RPI_IMAGE to the chroot name. This will be used by ltsp kernel to generate the appropriate symlinks from /srv/tftp/* to /srv/ltsp/raspios/boot/*.

[server]
RPI_IMAGE="raspios"

Then, run:

ltsp kernel raspios
ltsp initrd
ltsp nfs

NFS_RW netbooting¶

At this point we're ready to netboot a single client in NFS_RW mode. This means that whatever changes we do on that client, like installing new programs, are directly saved in /srv/ltsp/raspios.

First, export the chroot in NFS read-write mode:

echo '/srv/ltsp/raspios  *(rw,async,crossmnt,no_subtree_check,no_root_squash,insecure)' >/etc/exports.d/ltsp-raspios.exports
exportfs -ra

You may replace * with an IP to only allow access to a single client, or you may delete the /etc/exports.d/ltsp-raspios.exports file when you're done, so that there are no security issues.

Now boot a single client, add the LTSP PPA to your sources, and install the client-side packages:

apt install --install-recommends ltsp epoptes-client

LTSP mode netbooting¶

At this point our chroot contains the LTSP code and is ready to be netbooted. But it needs a different kernel cmdline than the NFS_RW mode, so run the following commands:

echo 'ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.67.1:/srv/ltsp/raspios,vers=3,tcp,nolock init=/usr/share/ltsp/client/init/init ltsp.image=images/raspios.img console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles modprobe.blacklist=bcm2835_v4l2' >/srv/ltsp/raspios/boot/cmdline.txt

# Finally, create the squashfs image
ltsp image raspios --mksquashfs-params='-comp lzo'

That's it, now you should be able to netboot all your Raspberry Pi clients.