I had managed to get Fedora running on my Rock Pi N10 some considerable time ago, but still was frustrated by the – apparent – lack of support for NVME, despite the slot for one in the chassis, and u-boot commands included..\u00a0 I had posted this question to the RADXA Forum, but did not get a useful response..<\/p>\n
As is often the case with SOC systems, there is a lot of confusing\/contradictory info online – more ‘opinion’ than ‘fact’..<\/p>\n
Conclusions….
\nMention of SPI boot was incorrect. Apparently the very early demo-dev units did have this capability, but none of the production units did, as it was superseded by the requirement for eMMC hardware support…
\nThe only boot devices recognised by _hardware_ are MMC – SDCard or eMMC – and u-boot must reside on on of these.
\nThe early version of u-boot provided with the device did not include the nvme command set, but later versions did..
\nAs is the case with many SOC systems, the N10 is sensitive to NVME brands.. I found that one of the so-called ‘low power’ examples worked correctly..<\/p>\n
Oddly, the M.2 NVME retaining screw is non-standard, with a M2.5 thread, instead of the usual M2 or M3..<\/p>\n There are recent versions of u-boot for the N10 available from OpenSUSE, by downloading and extracting from the RPMs at: https:\/\/download.opensuse.org\/distribution\/leap\/15.5\/repo\/oss\/aarch64\/<\/a> To install on SDCard (as root) I found that the 2022 version worked correctly, but the later 2023 version did not: The usual u-boot ‘nvme’ commands by themselves produced no result, and this was due to the fact that the NVME subsystem required initiation of PCI\/NVME by u-boot first..<\/p>\n So: Solution: The test system I set up consisted of u-boot on a blank SDCard, with the entire EFI\/ROOT Fedora 38 system on the NVME drive, but first I had to eradicate the old eMMC installation, as the N10 would _always_ boot from this, if it found it.. There were suggestions to ‘force’ boot from SDCard by “repeatedly pressing reset” but his never worked on my system, after many attempts… One incentive to make the change to NVME was that my N10 system only had a 16GB eMMC, which is not really large enough for a modern distro with KDE\/Plasma etc..<\/p>\n I cloned the F38 system from the eMMC to the new NVME, and to an old 16GB SDCard… and then changed fstab to point to the SDCard partitions, rebooted, and erased the entire eMMC using Then I inserted the blank SDCard with u-boot, and booted to the u-boot commands, for more testing.. I then copied this u-boot to the (empty) eMMC, removed the SDCard, and the system booted into Fedora 38 on the NVME drive..<\/p>\n When compiling the Linux kernel, the system does get rather hot – despite the large passive heatsink – and really needs a fan.. Robert Gadsdon.. July 5th 2023.<\/em> I had managed to get Fedora running on my Rock Pi N10 some considerable time ago, but still was frustrated by the – apparent – lack of support for NVME, despite the slot for one in the chassis, and u-boot commands included..\u00a0 I had posted this question to the RADXA Forum, but did not get a useful …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1132,1131,10,2029,11,15,2576,19,2577,937],"tags":[1135,1133,2580,2539,2578,2579,1175,372],"class_list":["post-3126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aarch64","category-arm64","category-fedora","category-fixed","category-hacks","category-linux-2","category-nvme","category-opinion","category-rock-pi-n10","category-u-boot-2","tag-aarch64","tag-arm64","tag-boot-from-nvme","tag-fedora-38","tag-nvme","tag-rock-pi-n10","tag-success","tag-u-boot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3126"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3139,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3126\/revisions\/3139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}0:01:00.0\/nvme\/nvme0
\nHardware Class: disk
\nModel: \"Lite-On LITEON CA3-8D256\"
\nVendor: pci 0x14a4 \"Lite-On Technology Corporation\"
\nDevice: pci 0x2300 \"LITEON CA3-8D256\"<\/code><\/p>\n
\nThe one I used was: u-boot-rock-pi-n10-rk3399pro-2022.01-193.2.aarch64.rpm<\/code>, which I extracted using ark<\/code>..<\/p>\n
\ndd if=idbloader.img of=\/dev\/sdX seek=64
\ndd if=u-boot.itb of=\/dev\/sdX seek=16384<\/code><\/p>\n
\n...........
\nUnknown command 'if' - try 'help'
\nUnknown command 'then' - try 'help'
\nUnknown command 'fi' - try 'help'
\n...............<\/code><\/p>\n
\n=> nvme scan
\n=> nvme info
\n=> nvme part
\nno nvme partition table available<\/code><\/p>\n
\n=> run boot_pci_enum
\n=> run nvme_init
\n=> nvme info
\nDevice 0: Vendor: 0x1987 Rev: EDFM60.1 Prod: 1348073319C700256779
\nType: Hard Disk
\nCapacity: 244198.3 MB = 238.4 GB (500118192 x 512)
\n=> nvme part
\nPartition Map for NVMe device 0 -- Partition Type: EFI
\nPart Start LBA End LBA Name
\nAttributes
\nType GUID
\nPartition GUID
\n1 0x00001000 0x00003fff \"\"
\nattrs: 0x0000000000000000
\ntype: 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4
\nguid: 69600cd4-e142-49b8-a0c0-897898f2eb94
\n2 0x00004000 0x000fdfff \"efi\"
\nattrs: 0x0000000000000000
\ntype: c12a7328-f81f-11d2-ba4b-00a0c93ec93b
\nguid: 164e1f9f-7f74-4447-9409-bf4537df5f4b
\n3 0x000fe000 0x1dcf2fff \"rootfs\"
\nattrs: 0x0000000000000000
\ntype: 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4
\nguid: b188625f-e60c-4b52-961c-79feda4fdc28<\/code><\/p>\n# blkdiscard -sf \/dev\/mmcblkX<\/code> Care is needed here, as I found that booting from eMMC versus SDCard _reversed_ the mmcblk1 and mmcblk0 references..<\/p>\n
\nI had expected to have to customise the u-boot parameters to reference the NVME correctly, but in fact the OpenSuse version included all necessary commands\/tests for this, and the boot process found EFI\/GRUB on the NVME, and I was able to boot the latest kernel (6.4.2) successfully…<\/p>\nFedora Linux 38 (Thirty Eight)
\nKernel 6.4.2 on an aarch64 (ttyS2)
\nWeb console: https:\/\/rgrockn10:9090\/ or https:\/\/192.168.0.22:9090\/
\n# cat \/etc\/fstab
\n\/dev\/nvme0n1p1 \/boot\/efi vfat umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 2
\n\/dev\/nvme0n1p2 \/ ext4 defaults 1 1<\/code><\/p>\n
\n# sensors
\ncpu_thermal-virtual-0
\nAdapter: Virtual device
\ntemp1: +70.0\u00b0C<\/code><\/p>\n
\nCredit is due to OpenSUSE, for producing workable and up-to-date u-boot versions, and EFI\/GRUB-capable install images, for so many SOC systems..<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"