[gentoo-user] Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[gentoo-user] Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Frank Tarczynski]

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I'm building a video conference appliance using a Raspberry Pi 4 for my
parents.

I'm using a RPi 4 that boots from a SD card and an USB webcam/microphone.

Gentoo is the only OS I can find that supports the USB webcam in both
Firefox and Chromium with no issues.

Getting my parents to understand that they need to shutdown the RPi before
hitting the power button is a challenge. And I've not been successful at
finding a case for the RPi 4 with a soft power switch and a fan.

Does anyone have pointers for booting Gentoo in to ram? Or a mode with a
read-only FS? Like the overlay mode in Raspbian?

Thanks.
Frank

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Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Ashley Dixon]

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On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 08:12:30AM -0400, Frank Tarczynski wrote:
> I'm building a video conference appliance using a Raspberry Pi 4 for my
> parents.
> 
> I'm using a RPi 4 that boots from a SD card and an USB webcam/microphone.
> 
> Gentoo is the only OS I can find that supports the USB webcam in both
> Firefox and Chromium with no issues.
> 
> Getting my parents to understand that they need to shutdown the RPi before
> hitting the power button is a challenge. And I've not been successful at
> finding a case for the RPi 4 with a soft power switch and a fan.

Gentoo seems like a terrible choice for those who are not technically  inclined.
Perhaps an easier solution, for the case of your parents, would  be  to  find  a
simpler and  smaller  O.S.\  and  then  triage/fix  the  webcam  and  microphone
problems.

Aside from the perceived resolution of the webcam and microphone  problems,  are
there any other significant reasons to use Gentoo ?  Especially on  a  Raspberry
Pi, it can be particularly difficult with the proprietary firmware.

-- 

Ashley Dixon
suugaku.co.uk

2A9A 4117
DA96 D18A
8A7B B0D2
A30E BF25
F290 A8AA


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Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Tue, 26 May 2020 13:39:45 +0100, Ashley Dixon wrote:

> On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 08:12:30AM -0400, Frank Tarczynski wrote:
> > I'm building a video conference appliance using a Raspberry Pi 4 for
> > my parents.
> > 
> > I'm using a RPi 4 that boots from a SD card and an USB
> > webcam/microphone.
> > 
> > Gentoo is the only OS I can find that supports the USB webcam in both
> > Firefox and Chromium with no issues.
> > 
> > Getting my parents to understand that they need to shutdown the RPi
> > before hitting the power button is a challenge. And I've not been
> > successful at finding a case for the RPi 4 with a soft power switch
> > and a fan.  
> 
> Gentoo seems like a terrible choice for those who are not technically
> inclined.

This is an appliance, the users merely turn it on and off. Administration
would presumably be done remotely by the OP, for which Gentoo is well
suited.

However, that is probably about the only advantage of Gentoo here, your
other points are so true.

OP: If you cannot find a commercial case that meets your needs, have a
look for a model on Thingiverse, then contact a local maker group to get
it 3D printed for you.


> Perhaps an easier solution, for the case of your parents,
> would  be  to  find  a simpler and  smaller  O.S.\  and  then
> triage/fix  the  webcam  and  microphone problems.
> 
> Aside from the perceived resolution of the webcam and microphone
> problems,  are there any other significant reasons to use Gentoo ?
> Especially on  a  Raspberry Pi, it can be particularly difficult with
> the proprietary firmware.
> 




-- 
Neil Bothwick

Use Colgate toothpaste or end up with teeth like a Ferengi.

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[gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2020-05-26, Frank Tarczynski <frank.tarczynski@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm building a video conference appliance using a Raspberry Pi 4 for
> my parents.

Sorry, no advice running Gentoo on RPi.  I run OSMC/Kodi on an older
RPi, and it works fine, but I don't think there are any video
conference apps for Kodi.

But...

For skype and zoom, I'd probably just buy them a 10" Kindle Fire.

There are Zoom and Skype apps available for it.  Main drawback:
smallish screen and limited to 4 video windows at a time in
zoom. However, it's portable: you can flip to the back camera and walk
around the house/yard to show something to people.  It's also nice in
that you can just tap on a Zoom invite url in the email app, and it
"just works".

I haven't trie Skype on Fire.

You can add hangounts/duo, but you've got to futz around sideloading
the Google App store first.

--
Grant

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Michael Jones]

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On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 12:16 PM Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 2020-05-26, Frank Tarczynski <frank.tarczynski@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm building a video conference appliance using a Raspberry Pi 4 for
> > my parents.
>
> Sorry, no advice running Gentoo on RPi.  I run OSMC/Kodi on an older
> RPi, and it works fine, but I don't think there are any video
> conference apps for Kodi.
>
> But...
>
> For skype and zoom, I'd probably just buy them a 10" Kindle Fire.
>
> There are Zoom and Skype apps available for it.  Main drawback:
> smallish screen and limited to 4 video windows at a time in
> zoom. However, it's portable: you can flip to the back camera and walk
> around the house/yard to show something to people.  It's also nice in
> that you can just tap on a Zoom invite url in the email app, and it
> "just works".
>
> I haven't trie Skype on Fire.
>
> You can add hangounts/duo, but you've got to futz around sideloading
> the Google App store first.
>
> --
> Grant



FYI, this project exists: https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Frank Tarczynski]

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That's the Gentoo version that I'm using. But I'm looking for a way to make
it bullet-proof to having the plug pulled.

Frank

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 1:19 PM Michael Jones <gentoo@jonesmz.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 12:16 PM Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 2020-05-26, Frank Tarczynski <frank.tarczynski@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > I'm building a video conference appliance using a Raspberry Pi 4 for
>> > my parents.
>>
>> Sorry, no advice running Gentoo on RPi.  I run OSMC/Kodi on an older
>> RPi, and it works fine, but I don't think there are any video
>> conference apps for Kodi.
>>
>> But...
>>
>> For skype and zoom, I'd probably just buy them a 10" Kindle Fire.
>>
>> There are Zoom and Skype apps available for it.  Main drawback:
>> smallish screen and limited to 4 video windows at a time in
>> zoom. However, it's portable: you can flip to the back camera and walk
>> around the house/yard to show something to people.  It's also nice in
>> that you can just tap on a Zoom invite url in the email app, and it
>> "just works".
>>
>> I haven't trie Skype on Fire.
>>
>> You can add hangounts/duo, but you've got to futz around sideloading
>> the Google App store first.
>>
>> --
>> Grant
>
>
>
> FYI, this project exists: https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit
>

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[antlists]

On 26/05/2020 18:28, Frank Tarczynski wrote:
> That's the Gentoo version that I'm using. But I'm looking for a way to 
> make it bullet-proof to having the plug pulled.

Don't use an SD card? Seriously, pulling the power on an SD card has 
been known to corrupt it beyond recovery. BUT.

Is the big worry that the home directory will get corrupted etc etc? I 
don't know if you can partition an SD card, but look at doing a 
kiosk-style install with the OS protected and read-only. Then look at 
sticking a loopback device on top of home, so that any changes exist 
only in ram, and are lost on shutdown. Hopefully, that means you now 
have a system that can boot and run off a write-protected SD card :-)

Look at the raid wiki site

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid#When_Things_Go_Wrogn

and especially the stuff on recovering a damaged raid for info about how 
to set up loopback.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Tue, 26 May 2020 19:14:18 +0100, antlists wrote:

> > That's the Gentoo version that I'm using. But I'm looking for a way
> > to make it bullet-proof to having the plug pulled.  
> 
> Don't use an SD card? Seriously, pulling the power on an SD card has 
> been known to corrupt it beyond recovery. BUT.

Mounting the card with sync will significantly reduce the likelihood of
corruption, at a cost of reduced life. 

> Is the big worry that the home directory will get corrupted etc etc? I 
> don't know if you can partition an SD card, but look at doing a 
> kiosk-style install with the OS protected and read-only. Then look at 
> sticking a loopback device on top of home, so that any changes exist 
> only in ram, and are lost on shutdown. Hopefully, that means you now 
> have a system that can boot and run off a write-protected SD card :-)

This will mitigate the reduced life as you are hardly writing to the
card. Booting from a read-only / has caused problems for me in the past,
because of the inability to write to /etc.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Politically Incorrect -- and damn proud of it!

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Michael Jones]

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On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 1:27 PM Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:

> On Tue, 26 May 2020 19:14:18 +0100, antlists wrote:
>
> > > That's the Gentoo version that I'm using. But I'm looking for a way
> > > to make it bullet-proof to having the plug pulled.
> >
> > Don't use an SD card? Seriously, pulling the power on an SD card has
> > been known to corrupt it beyond recovery. BUT.
>
> Mounting the card with sync will significantly reduce the likelihood of
> corruption, at a cost of reduced life.
>
> > Is the big worry that the home directory will get corrupted etc etc? I
> > don't know if you can partition an SD card, but look at doing a
> > kiosk-style install with the OS protected and read-only. Then look at
> > sticking a loopback device on top of home, so that any changes exist
> > only in ram, and are lost on shutdown. Hopefully, that means you now
> > have a system that can boot and run off a write-protected SD card :-)
>
> This will mitigate the reduced life as you are hardly writing to the
> card. Booting from a read-only / has caused problems for me in the past,
> because of the inability to write to /etc.
>



Consider a hybrid approach like how many embedded systems do things. E.g.
openwrt.

/root is actually a read-only squashfs image, and on top of that there's an
overlay fs that uses a second partition as it's backing storage.

This way, almost all of your system is purely read-only, but you have the
ability to store changes to things you need to store changes for.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[antlists]

On 26/05/2020 19:27, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> This will mitigate the reduced life as you are hardly writing to the
> card. Booting from a read-only / has caused problems for me in the past,
> because of the inability to write to /etc.

Well, if we can get a loopback into the boot sequence before you write 
to /etc (why did it want to write to it?), then it won't realise that it 
can't. You just have to accept that all writes will get lost on power-down.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[antlists]

On 26/05/2020 19:27, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Tue, 26 May 2020 19:14:18 +0100, antlists wrote:
> 
>>> That's the Gentoo version that I'm using. But I'm looking for a way
>>> to make it bullet-proof to having the plug pulled.

>> Don't use an SD card? Seriously, pulling the power on an SD card has
>> been known to corrupt it beyond recovery. BUT.

> Mounting the card with sync will significantly reduce the likelihood of
> corruption, at a cost of reduced life.
> 
Well, compared to a dead card, a reduced life is a small price to pay :-)

I think you're talking about a corrupted filesystem, I'm talking about a 
corrupt/dead card ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Tue, 26 May 2020 20:13:29 +0100, antlists wrote:

> > Mounting the card with sync will significantly reduce the likelihood
> > of corruption, at a cost of reduced life.
> >   
> Well, compared to a dead card, a reduced life is a small price to pay
> :-)

A dead card is a reduced life ;-)
 
> I think you're talking about a corrupted filesystem, I'm talking about
> a corrupt/dead card ...

I am. I still think the idea of a soft power button is the least complex
and most reliable approach.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

I've got a Mickey Mouse PC with a Goofy operating system.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[William Kenworthy]

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On 27/5/20 3:26 am, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Tue, 26 May 2020 20:13:29 +0100, antlists wrote:
>
>>> Mounting the card with sync will significantly reduce the likelihood
>>> of corruption, at a cost of reduced life.
>>>   
>> Well, compared to a dead card, a reduced life is a small price to pay
>> :-)
> A dead card is a reduced life ;-)
>  
>> I think you're talking about a corrupted filesystem, I'm talking about
>> a corrupt/dead card ...
> I am. I still think the idea of a soft power button is the least complex
> and most reliable approach.
>
I'll add a "me too" - soft power off rules.  Look into a pi-juice Hat or
similar - it has a battery and can turn off properly either at low
battery, or when power is removed.  Alternatively, a pi is very low
power anyway ... why not just leave it on in a featureless "black box"
with no lights showing and program the remote to to do a fake
"standbay/off" that triggers a script to blank the video and or reset
the screen to the entry menu? (if you are like me, playing with the gear
is way more fun than using it as a media box! :)

I have a few different pi's and similar Odroid arm systems running
Gentoo on sdcards - the failure rate is a real and constant problem (and
seems worse on pi's no matter what brand/type of sdcard so keep an up to
date spare+backups) and I am thinking of doing a disk-less NFS using the
a minimal sdcard image. Has advantages in centralised management and
using small cheap sdcards with possibly better performance.

BillK


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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Wed, 27 May 2020 08:44:08 +0800, William Kenworthy wrote:

> I have a few different pi's and similar Odroid arm systems running
> Gentoo on sdcards - the failure rate is a real and constant problem (and
> seems worse on pi's no matter what brand/type of sdcard so keep an up to
> date spare+backups) and I am thinking of doing a disk-less NFS using the
> a minimal sdcard image. Has advantages in centralised management and
> using small cheap sdcards with possibly better performance.

I'm moving over to using Balena on Pis wherever possible. N more keeping
track of multiple different SD card backup images and easy centralised
management. 


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Like an atheist in a grave: all dressed up and no place to go.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[J. Roeleveld]

On Wednesday, May 27, 2020 9:39:06 AM CEST Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Wed, 27 May 2020 08:44:08 +0800, William Kenworthy wrote:
> > I have a few different pi's and similar Odroid arm systems running
> > Gentoo on sdcards - the failure rate is a real and constant problem (and
> > seems worse on pi's no matter what brand/type of sdcard so keep an up to
> > date spare+backups) and I am thinking of doing a disk-less NFS using the
> > a minimal sdcard image. Has advantages in centralised management and
> > using small cheap sdcards with possibly better performance.
> 
> I'm moving over to using Balena on Pis wherever possible. N more keeping
> track of multiple different SD card backup images and easy centralised
> management.

Do you have a simple howto for this?
What I see when I quickly check, it only mentions docker.

--
Joost

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Wed, 27 May 2020 10:24:21 +0200, J. Roeleveld wrote:

> > I'm moving over to using Balena on Pis wherever possible. N more
> > keeping track of multiple different SD card backup images and easy
> > centralised management.  
> 
> Do you have a simple howto for this?
> What I see when I quickly check, it only mentions docker.

It is Docker based, but there are a lot of ready to use images available.

Simple howto:

if image_is_available; then
	install_it
else
	learn_docker :(
fi

Hence my use of "wherever possible".

This may suit the OP

https://www.balena.io/blog/put-friends-and-loved-ones-on-the-big-screen-with-this-instant-video-call-project/


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Assembler: (n.) a minor program of interest only to obsessed programmers.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo RPi boot to ram or read-only FS?

[antlists]

On 27/05/2020 01:44, William Kenworthy wrote:
> I have a few different pi's and similar Odroid arm systems running
> Gentoo on sdcards - the failure rate is a real and constant problem (and
> seems worse on pi's no matter what brand/type of sdcard so keep an up to
> date spare+backups) and I am thinking of doing a disk-less NFS using the
> a minimal sdcard image. Has advantages in centralised management and
> using small cheap sdcards with possibly better performance.

Hmmm...

The trouble from my point of view is it seems micro-SDs are unreliable. 
I've never had a full-size SD card fail on me, but I've binned several 
of the micro version. But apart from big hefty DSLRs, not much takes the 
full-size cards any more ...

Cheers,
Wol