[doug]

Hi,

I'm examining using 2 RPis in my house with my Windows 7 HTPC. The Windows 7 box is currently running Eden and acts as the server for my house. When Frodo is final, I hope to run a synced library. One thing bothering me, however, is whether the RPi will be able to handle the picture thumbnails generated from my Windows 7 box given the memory limits of the RPi? Or should/can I have 2 thumbnail caches...one for the RPis and one for any other OS?

The other thing I'm hoping to do is to boot the 2 RPis from the Windows network (using a couple old 256MB SD cards for the actual RPi boot). Has anyone done this? None of my searching, mostly at raspberrypi.org, on whether this is possible hasn't been fruitful.

Doug

[Ned Scott]

By default XBMC will use individual thumb caches for MySQL.

[doug]

Well that's good to know.

And then I can probably use Path Substitution to change the location of the thumbs from my SD card to my windows network and avoid trying to use PXE?

Doug

[Ned Scott]

The only reason to use path subs for thumbs would be if you don't have enough drive space on the Pi.

[doug]

I was thinking that thumbs would load faster over the network (up to 100mbps) versus the SD card on the Pi (Class 10 speeds up to 80mb/s). But I'm now thinking that spending a few bucks on a fast USB flash drive would be better.
Thanks for the help, Ned.

[nickr]

Net booting the rpi is not possible

[gimli]

Net booting the rpi is not possible

Half true. You can have the roots on a NFS server.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=149607

[s7mx1]

Net booting the rpi is not possible

Try this

http://www.raspbmc.com/2012/12/xbmc-rele...-and-more/

and this

http://forum.stmlabs.com/showthread.php?tid=5496

[doug]

Try this

http://www.raspbmc.com/2012/12/xbmc-rele...-and-more/

and this

http://forum.stmlabs.com/showthread.php?tid=5496

Thanks. Will give it a try and see if it works with HaneNFS. Hopefully it does.

[Milhouse]

I was thinking that thumbs would load faster over the network (up to 100mbps) versus the SD card on the Pi (Class 10 speeds up to 80mb/s). But I'm now thinking that spending a few bucks on a fast USB flash drive would be better.
Thanks for the help, Ned.

Not sure about your numbers.

The Pi has only a Fast Ethernet NIC (100Mbit/s or ~10MBytes/sec), while a decent Class 10 SD card in a Pi can read in excess of 20MBytes/sec.

SD card performance (SanDisk Extreme Class 10 32GB):

Code:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ dd if=/dev/zero of=./test.dat bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 53.309 s, 20.1 MB/s
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ dd if=./test.dat of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 50.322 s, 21.3 MB/s

and the same test file being read over NFS:

Code:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ dd if=/freenas/data/test.dat of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 93.2762 s, 11.5 MB/s

[nickr]

Net booting the rpi is not possible

Try this

http://www.raspbmc.com/2012/12/xbmc-rele...-and-more/

and this

http://forum.stmlabs.com/showthread.php?tid=5496

Neither of those pages contradict me (in fact the forst doesn't seem relevant at all). You need to boot off the sd card, after that you can mount any part of your file system over nfs, but that is not net booting.

[doug]

Not sure about your numbers.

I should have said that Class 10 SD cards are minimum 10MB/s (write). Mine just happens to be 10MB/s. Hopefully I can get an NFS boot running with HaneWin. I'll just go with that instead of new SD cards or USB drives.