WW on Raspberry Pi?

[Jeff Layton]

Good afternoon WW fans!

Please suspend your judgment and condemnation for
a few moments :) I'm playing with WW on a Raspberry Pi 2
cluster (2 nodes). Has anyone tried WW on a Raspberry Pi
and care to share any tips? (I won't judge).

Please feel free to unsuspend your judgement and
condemnation now.

Thanks!

Jeff

[Gregory M. Kurtzer]

Can the Raspberry PXE or do you need to embed the bootstrap to the firmware?

Wait a second,... isn't the Pi ARM? :-o

Jeff

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Gregory M. Kurtzer
Technical Lead and HPC Systems Architect
High Performance Computing Services (HPCS)
University of California
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
One Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720

[Allen, Benjamin S.]

Hi Jeff,

Just off the top of my head, issues are going to be:

1. PXE boot (or equivalent functionality) on the Pi's U-BOOT
2. Warewulf uses iPXE, which doesn't run on ARM: http://forum.ipxe.org/showthread.php?tid=6808. iPXE isn't a strict requirement, you just need something that can boot a Linux kernel and initrd over the network via TFTP or HTTP. This is going to require specific dhcpd.conf configuration I'm sure.
3. The vnfs.pl CGI script likes to use a lot of memory, so keep your VNFS size under the amount of RAM you have.
4. Stateless images live in RAM on the node, so keep them small. You should be able to use the local SD card for stateful installs alternatively.
5. You'll need to compile all of Warewulf on ARM, mainly so busybox (i.e. initfs.gz) gets compiled for arm.
6. You may run into issues with wwmkchroot and wwvnfs

Let us know as you run into problems.

Ben

[Jeff Layton]

Ben,

Good list - thanks! I hadn't thought about the Pi not having
PXE. I've gotten so used to it being everywhere...

I'm planning to do a stateful installation. 1GB just doesn't
get you too far these days. I used a 32-bit 1GB desktop for
many years and it was fine but as Openoffice, Firefox, and
other tools got larger, I had to punt to 64-bits.

I installed WW 3.5 on the "Master Pi" using the Debian
install-wwdebsystem script. The script is pretty nice.
It took a while to complete but so far so good. Next step
is to try booting a compute node...

Thanks!

Jeff