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Comment by peanutbox | Hacker News Reader

"It cannot boot directly from the NVMe port, however."

My RockPro64 boots directly from NVMe.

I use Tow-Boot, and my initrd has the modules needed to boot NVMe.

You sure it's not booting kernel from eMMC, and the rest of the userland stored on NVMe? Admittedly it's been a while since I looked into this, but this was the closes solution available at that point. I'd like to get rid of the eMMC module entirely so the setup truly is "NVMe only" without having to keep the eMMC module around just for initrd and the kernel. Supposedly they can boot from the internal SPI flash somehow, and then "jump" to NVMe, but I don't know how.

> You sure it's not booting kernel from eMMC, and the rest of the userland stored on NVMe?

I'm sure, since my RockPro64 has no eMMC (I didn't order one, and I just checked that my eMMC slot is empty).

I have Tow-Boot installed on my SPI, which when booted jumps to the NVMe device.

My initrd has modules "nvme pcie_rockchip_host phy_rockchip_pcie" which are needed for Linux to detect and then mount the rootfs.

  $ mount
  [...]
  /dev/nvme0n1p1 on / type ext4
  /dev/nvme0n1p3 on /boot/efi type vfat
  [...]

That's great. Do you know where I can find instructions on how to flash Tow-Boot to the SPI and how to configure it?

Add.: never mind, I found that Tow-Boot has excellent documentation for the whole procedure. Thanks for the heads-up on Tow-Boot.

Tow-Boot is great, and slowly being adopted by distributions (typically mobile distributions) as the way to do firmware/booting on aarch64.

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