NetBoot the Raspberry Pi 4

Setup Netboot

The Raspberry Pi "Should" be able to boot from network right out of the box.... Should is an over used word in tech. In my experience "Should" does not work in this case.

The following is how I have gotten the Raspberry Pi 4 to boot from network. I also have the Raspberry Pi 3 net booting if you would like that on a similar page drop me a comment on the contact page.

Disclaimer my network equipment is Ubiquity, my tftp and NFS servers are a Synology. I already had a dhcp and nfs servers, I did not feel the need to setup another one just for netbooting Pi's.

RASPBERRY PI 4

We start with the lite version flashed to a SD card and the usual update:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Then download the latest eeprom:

# at the time of writing this was it

wget https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/raw/master/firmware/beta/pieeprom-2019-10-16.bin

Build a new boot config.txt

You will need to change the boot order and the tftp server

rpi-eeprom-config pieeprom-2019-10-16.bin > bootconf.txt

sed -i s/0x1/0x21/g bootconf.txt

Example bootconfig.txt

[all]

BOOT_UART=0

WAKE_ON_GPIO=1

POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=0

DHCP_TIMEOUT=45000

DHCP_REQ_TIMEOUT=4000

TFTP_FILE_TIMEOUT=30000

TFTP_IP=<my tftp server ip address ie. 10.200.0.10>

BOOT_ORDER=0x21

SD_BOOT_MAX_RETRIES=3

NET_BOOT_MAX_RETRIES=5

[none]

FREEZE_VERSION=0

Create a new eeprom image

rpi-eeprom-config --out pieeprom-2019-10-16-netboot.bin --config bootconf.txt pieeprom-2019-10-16.bin

Upload the eeprom image

sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -f ./pieeprom-2019-10-16-netboot.bin

Get Serial number (this is needed for the tftp server)

cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep Serial (last 8 characters is needed for tftp boot folder)

Restart the Pi to make sure everything takes

sudo reboot

Your pi should be ready to boot from network now.

sudo shutdown -h

#as root

tcpdump port 69

References

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md