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logistiker
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Joined: 16 Jun 2008
Posts: 41
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 Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 4:20 am Post subject: Gentoo as network booting mythtv frontend? |
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| Anyone know if it's possible to build gentoo so that it can network boot (diskless) and run in system ram as a mythtv frontend? I think it would be awesome if portage could be utilized to manage the packages for such a system. Yes I've tried minimyth but I find its features sorely lacking and the ability to make changes to it is not easy. |
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Zooloo
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Joined: 08 Nov 2009
Posts: 1
Location: Bærum, Norway
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| Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 12:57 pm Post subject: |
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| I've got a diskless gentoo with Mythfrontend running in my livingroom for a few years. It's been a while since I installed it, but remember starting with this guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/diskless-howto.xml. |
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logistiker
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Joined: 16 Jun 2008
Posts: 41
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| Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2009 6:38 am Post subject: |
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| How about a diskless ramdisk howto (i.e. without the need for nfs)? |
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BonesToo
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Joined: 19 Aug 2003
Posts: 153
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| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 3:22 am Post subject: |
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| logistiker wrote: | | How about a diskless ramdisk howto (i.e. without the need for nfs)? |
you can prolly do that but why? Yould have to wait for the entire image of your root fs to be downloaded over the network. Could be a couple gigs everytime you boot up. What's wrong with nfs mount? Or you could mount it from a usb thumb drive. But I don't think you want to copy your entire fs to ram everytime you boot up. |
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logistiker
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Joined: 16 Jun 2008
Posts: 41
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| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 4:08 am Post subject: |
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| BonesToo wrote: | | logistiker wrote: | | How about a diskless ramdisk howto (i.e. without the need for nfs)? |
you can prolly do that but why? Yould have to wait for the entire image of your root fs to be downloaded over the network. Could be a couple gigs everytime you boot up. What's wrong with nfs mount? Or you could mount it from a usb thumb drive. But I don't think you want to copy your entire fs to ram everytime you boot up. |
I've decided on the nfs direction. I have it set up now and almost fully configured. It would help if the diskless documentation on gentoo was updated because it doesn't work and it suggested to share the file structure with the server which is crazy. You really need to set up a chroot environment with an entire new file structure for a new system because of hardware differences. It's also disappointing that there are no good nfs4 docs for gentoo. The best thing I could find was: http://www.brennan.id.au/19-Network_File_System.html
Another thing I've noticed about a rootfs nfs machine is try not to emerge much on it -- do it on the server with chroot. At best it segfaults a lot of the time and at worst, it freezes the whole machine requiring a reboot.
In regards to rootfs on ram, minimyth does it and you'd be surprised how fast it loads. The rootfs is only 86M. I have no idea how he gets it that small. |
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BonesToo
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Joined: 19 Aug 2003
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| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 4:55 am Post subject: |
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I have no problem emerging packages on my diskless system (def need a chroot env). Are you using a swap partition across nfs? I don't run any swap, but I have 2 gigs of ram so I actually mount /tmp and /var/tmp (where portage works) as tmpfs in ram. Compiling is sooo fast. The only package I've had trouble with is gcc, I don't have enough ram to compile it, so I unmount /var/tmp and compile on the nfs mount, slow as hell, but it works.
I've never looked at minimyth, so not sure about it. Is this a livecd you boot? Loading a rootfs image from cd or usb or something local is def an option, but a network load is a lot slower, well depending on what kind of network you are running across. But a gentoo os isn't 86M either 
good luck! |
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logistiker
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Joined: 16 Jun 2008
Posts: 41
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| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 5:06 am Post subject: |
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| BonesToo wrote: | I have no problem emerging packages on my diskless system (def need a chroot env). Are you using a swap partition across nfs? I don't run any swap, but I have 2 gigs of ram so I actually mount /tmp and /var/tmp (where portage works) as tmpfs in ram. Compiling is sooo fast. The only package I've had trouble with is gcc, I don't have enough ram to compile it, so I unmount /var/tmp and compile on the nfs mount, slow as hell, but it works.
I've never looked at minimyth, so not sure about it. Is this a livecd you boot? Loading a rootfs image from cd or usb or something local is def an option, but a network load is a lot slower, well depending on what kind of network you are running across. But a gentoo os isn't 86M either
good luck! |
I don't have any swap. How do you mount /tmp and /var/tmp on the client as tmpfs in ram on the client? May be this is why compiling on my client is so slow.
I was using network boot with gpxe serving the rootfs and kernel over http. It was quite fast. I'm moving away from minimyth though because of stability issues. It locks up quite a bit when running the ram version of it. |
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BonesToo
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Joined: 19 Aug 2003
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| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 5:08 am Post subject: |
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| logistiker wrote: |
I don't have any swap. How do you mount /tmp and /var/tmp on the client as tmpfs in ram on the client? May be this is why compiling on my client is so slow. |
Add these two lines to your fstab
| Code: | tmpfsTmp /tmp tmpfs mode=1777 0 0
tmpfsVarTmp /var/tmp tmpfs mode=1777 0 0
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Will supercharger your compiling. |
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logistiker
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Joined: 16 Jun 2008
Posts: 41
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| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 5:20 am Post subject: |
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| BonesToo wrote: | | logistiker wrote: |
I don't have any swap. How do you mount /tmp and /var/tmp on the client as tmpfs in ram on the client? May be this is why compiling on my client is so slow. |
Add these two lines to your fstab
| Code: | tmpfsTmp /tmp tmpfs mode=1777 0 0
tmpfsVarTmp /var/tmp tmpfs mode=1777 0 0
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Will supercharger your compiling. |
You got that right! That made all the difference. The configure used to be extremely slow and would lock up or cause the client to lock up. Thanks! |
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Floppe
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Joined: 27 Feb 2003
Posts: 50
Location: Finland
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| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 7:11 am Post subject: |
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I've also been running a diskless myth for some years now. But I'm only mounting /var/tmp/portage as tmpfs and it works great. Also can compile gcc with 2 gigs of ram in the box.
my fstab line
| Code: | none /var/tmp/portage tmpfs size=1000M,nr_inodes=1M 0 0
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// Floppe |
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logistiker
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Joined: 16 Jun 2008
Posts: 41
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| Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 6:42 am Post subject: |
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| BonesToo wrote: | | logistiker wrote: |
I don't have any swap. How do you mount /tmp and /var/tmp on the client as tmpfs in ram on the client? May be this is why compiling on my client is so slow. |
Add these two lines to your fstab
| Code: | tmpfsTmp /tmp tmpfs mode=1777 0 0
tmpfsVarTmp /var/tmp tmpfs mode=1777 0 0
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Will supercharger your compiling. |
Ok this is mixed. Compiling is much faster but I periodically get segmentation faults which crashes emerge on my diskless frontend. Sometimes the fault is so bad it crashes the kernel forcing reboot. Any idea what might be going on with this? |
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logistiker
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Joined: 16 Jun 2008
Posts: 41
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| Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 3:10 pm Post subject: |
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| Never mind. I found the problem. Apparently clocking my ddr1066 ocz modules to run at 1066 is possibly a stretch or I need to tweak it some more. I set the clock auto (800) and I haven't had any crashes since. |
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logistiker
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Joined: 16 Jun 2008
Posts: 41
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| Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 5:02 pm Post subject: |
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After searching around, I found that this is a much better explanation on how to gpxe boot using nfs root:
http://www.fit-pc.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_to_use_Etherboot
One caveat that I've noticed on diskless install instructions for gentoo is that they forget to mention to remove "network" from all runlevels. Apparently network mucks with the routes and does not preserve the route properly when the client booted off the network. If you don't disable this, the default gateway won't be set even if eth0 is set to noop and net.eth0 is removed from /etc/init.d. |
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BonesToo
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Joined: 19 Aug 2003
Posts: 153
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| Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 7:58 pm Post subject: |
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| logistiker wrote: | | One caveat that I've noticed on diskless install instructions for gentoo is that they forget to mention to remove "network" from all runlevels. Apparently network mucks with the routes and does not preserve the route properly when the client booted off the network. If you don't disable this, the default gateway won't be set even if eth0 is set to noop and net.eth0 is removed from /etc/init.d. |
Cool, good to hear you figured it out.
I just set config_eth0=( "noop" ) in /etc/conf.d/net
and yea I remove net.eth0 from the runlevel using rc-update. Boom it works. Don't really have to delete the init.d script, but that works too.
Side note: if you want wake-on-lan to work set RC_DOWN_INTERFACE="no" in /etc/conf.d/rc
That will keep your network card powered during shutdown. |
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