Follow https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss... for progress. You can't boot directly from the SSD without a microSD card, but it (or SATA support for boot) may come soon... just a question of priorities for the Pi Engineering team.
Do you happen to know if booting from the SSD is limited by the closed source bits of the Pi system or is this an effort the open source community can possibly contribute?
I imagine it's limited quite a bit by the odd way the Pi boots. It's the GPU, not the CPU (or a BIOS type setup), that initially runs the bootloader.
IMHO PCIe (and SDRAM) should be the only interface exposed by a modern CPU. On-board graphics, audio and NICs usually are shitty anyway. SATA is not relevant any more - we better plug an NVMe SSD into PCIe (or get a controller if actually needed). Full USB-C (or ongoing USB-4) means Thunderbolt which is PCIe. Why waste silicon on anything but PCIe then?
> On-board graphics, audio and NICs usually are shitty anyway. Onboard graphics, audio and NICs are perfectly functional and more than enough for most people. Both in work environments and at homes. They've not been in a shitty category for years now. They won't break any records, but they will display websites at high resolution, play clear music, and provide more bandwidth than the link to the internet can handle.…
> play clear music
Then why are there so many audio hats, let alone USB audio dongles used even in the RaspberryPi world?
> On-board graphics, audio and NICs usually are shitty anyway. Onboard graphics, audio and NICs are perfectly functional and more than enough for most people. Both in work environments and at homes. They've not been in a shitty category for years now. They won't break any records, but they will display websites at high resolution, play clear music, and provide more bandwidth than the link to the internet can handle.…
I really love the pushback here. Yes how awesome it is you are privileged enough to always be able to acquire the best of the best and look down on other "inferior" devices. But 99% of the rest of us just need things that work and allow us access to good performance.
I actually use everything built-in because what I use are a decade-old business laptop, an office desktop and a RaspberryPi. But going to buy a good desktop (as I used to have 2 decades ago) I would rather buy a good mainboard with as many PCIe slots as possible (and no built-in devices if this were possible), the cheapest discrete cards for everything and upgrade them as I see fit. I doubt the cheapest/used discrete card for anything is going to be worse or more expensive than a built-in non-removable version.
My first thought was "can you boot from a PCIe SSD?" (looks like the answer is "no" from what I see). I wish there was a RPi with 16GB or 32GB of storage soldered to the board. Where I work we're using Raspberry Pi devices for industrial use and corruption of/wearing out the microSD card has been something we've wondered about. We could just buy premium microSD cards but having a "proper" SSD soldered to the board wo…
We've had good success with making SD cards read-only. Of course this means that any data needs to be sent to a service for saving... YMMV.
My first thought was "can you boot from a PCIe SSD?" (looks like the answer is "no" from what I see). I wish there was a RPi with 16GB or 32GB of storage soldered to the board. Where I work we're using Raspberry Pi devices for industrial use and corruption of/wearing out the microSD card has been something we've wondered about. We could just buy premium microSD cards but having a "proper" SSD soldered to the board wo…
If the system can see the PCIe SSD, you could always boot off the microSD card but use the PCIe SSD as the primary storage device. Definitely worth testing imo.
Ah, but have you ever run PCIe over 115200 baud serial? :) We did that for the PS4 hardware experiments, and that also involved a PCIe hotplug capable motherboard, as we had a PS4 southbridge patched in as a PCIe device on a normal PC, and every time we powered on the PS4 that was effectively hotplugging it. Fun times. These days PCIe hotplug is a consumer technology, it's called Thunderbolt (it's hotplug at the logi…
I read the first sentence of this post without noticing your username and thought, “wait, wasn’t that marcan?” — of course it was :) It’s a good time to rewatch that classic talk (and probably some other old ccc talks, there’s a wealth of great ones.)
This is something that I miss about forums of yore and sort of hate about HN, Reddit, and their ilk: the deprioritization of a post author's identity. I miss being able to scan through a forum's post listing and readily pick out names of posters I recognized after being involved in the site for a while. It was an additional signal of post quality (or lack thereof, depending on the user). Here, the username is hidden in a sentence of status text, on the same visual level of the number of minutes ago the post was made, all of which is rendered in a light grey font. It's clearly intentional, and I can't for the life of me figure out why the forum owners don't want users to be able to build a consistent identity.
My first thought was "can you boot from a PCIe SSD?" (looks like the answer is "no" from what I see). I wish there was a RPi with 16GB or 32GB of storage soldered to the board. Where I work we're using Raspberry Pi devices for industrial use and corruption of/wearing out the microSD card has been something we've wondered about. We could just buy premium microSD cards but having a "proper" SSD soldered to the board wo…
My first thought was "can you boot from a PCIe SSD?" (looks like the answer is "no" from what I see). I wish there was a RPi with 16GB or 32GB of storage soldered to the board. Where I work we're using Raspberry Pi devices for industrial use and corruption of/wearing out the microSD card has been something we've wondered about. We could just buy premium microSD cards but having a "proper" SSD soldered to the board wo…
We've had good success with making SD cards read-only. Of course this means that any data needs to be sent to a service for saving... YMMV.
+1 to this. I've seen this done as well, and it works marvelously. SD cards last half of forever if all you're using them for is a boot device.
Follow https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss... for progress. You can't boot directly from the SSD without a microSD card, but it (or SATA support for boot) may come soon... just a question of priorities for the Pi Engineering team.
Do you happen to know if booting from the SSD is limited by the closed source bits of the Pi system or is this an effort the open source community can possibly contribute?
Would a chip (such as a CPLD/FPGA) implementing mmc/sd be an option? It could host a chainloader with PCIe support and serve as a kind of rom.
Also, is there any work on kernel level x86 emulation on arm for expansion roms?
IMHO PCIe (and SDRAM) should be the only interface exposed by a modern CPU. On-board graphics, audio and NICs usually are shitty anyway. SATA is not relevant any more - we better plug an NVMe SSD into PCIe (or get a controller if actually needed). Full USB-C (or ongoing USB-4) means Thunderbolt which is PCIe. Why waste silicon on anything but PCIe then?