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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

What are you using for a filesystem? NFS?

My worry would be saturating the older 100Mbit connections when downloading things like docker images.

Yes, TFTP for the boot rom, and then NFS for the root fs.

I don't use docker or any other kind of container system because it's so easy to just reboot a Pi into a new OS on demand. Everything runs natively.

That's what we did when developing our original Embedded Linux stuff. Once you get it working it's really nice. You have your standard tools, version control, etc running locally on your system.

That's more a problem of docker than NFS though. You probably would be better if you just use it traditionally or use something like NixOS.

There was a project that I read about a while ago: https://matthewbauer.us/blog/nixiosk.html

> My worry would be saturating the older 100Mbit connections when downloading things like docker images.

Is that too slow? I feel like 30 seconds to fill up half the ram is a perfectly acceptable boot time.

100mbit is similar to a slow sd card or usb stick anyway?

The Pi4 can do 300-350mbps, which is faster than most people's internet connection.

Netbooting and mounting NFS root would be done over local lan, the speed of internet connection has no relevance there.

Right, I was referring to my parent comment that talked about pulling Docker images which come from the internet unless you set up a proxy.

Ok, that depends on the docker images; things like pihole are relatively small (300 MB, including all layers); I would be more afraid of running containers over NFS slowed down by rpi ethernet, than downloading the images themselves.

Agreed. I'd have it set up so that there is some local storage via a USB3 thumb drive to hold the container images, which anecdotally pretty easily hits 80MB/s for reads, often hovering in the 100-110MB/s range.

True, but if you're netbooting you're probably not going to the internet.

Actually, just tested on my local network, got ~940 Mbps sending and receiving. Pi4 has real Gbit now, not limited by the USB bandwidth any more.

I can download large files from my pi at 900mb/s and upload around 800mb/s. The hard drives attached to the pie are formatted ext3. If you use an NTFS drive though, you will get speeds around what you are describing.

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