Booting multiple RPis in Parallel

[eli-tracxpoint]

Hi guys! I'm using a non-SD card setup of 6 x RPi zero that booting with rpiboot and fetching the filesystem from NFS folder. The issue here is that booting them serially with rpiboot takes a lot of time. Is there a way using rpiboot on multiple RPis in parallel instead of using the loop flag (-l) that boots serially.

Thanks!

[ghollingworth]

You'd need to rewrite rpiboot to run a new thread for each device as it enumerates, then each thread runs the same bit of code

[lurch]

I wonder if https://github.com/balena-io-modules/node-raspberrypi-usbboot might have better threading support? (although I've no idea if it'll be possible to adapt it to support your scenario)

[cleverca22]

https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-tools/tree/master/webusbboot

another issue ive found a potential solution to by accident webusb is entirely event driven, so one thread can manage multiple devices at once

webusbboot has been confirmed to be able to:

• reflash the rpi4b eeprom (both with recovery.bin, and eeprom self-reflash)
• boot into VPU MSD mode (with msd/start4.elf)
• boot into linux MSD mode (tested with nixos-msd but others should work too)

it works on linux (even android), windows has general webusb issues, darwin untested

[burtyb]

With https://github.com/raspberrypi/usbboot/pull/66 you could also run rpiboot for each Pi you want to boot or use the existing -1/-2/etc. option if the port numbers aren't repeated (as they are on the 3B+).

[timg236]

Closed due to inactivity.