Re: Pinebook Pro boot from NVME

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2023-10-12, paul wrote:
> On 10/12/23 06:41, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
>> On 2023-10-07, paul via wrote:
>>> I'm using tow boot and i have armbian on emmc, guix system on sd card
>>> and guix system on nvme. One really strange behavior happens:
>>>
>>>   1. I choose the nvme option in tow boot
>>>   2. I'm instantaneously presented the U-Boot menu (as opposed to when I
>>>      choose the sd card, where I'm also presented u-boot but quite a lot
>>>      slower) so I'm pretty sure that the bootloader is correctly read
>>>      from the disk
>>>   3. a Guix System loads but when I log in as root and run mount the /
>>>      filesystem is mounted on /dev/mmblk1
>> Does it boot to the NVMe partition correctly when you remove the SD
>> card?
> No it does not. If I remove the sd card and don't change anything else 
> guix is not booting. I'm attaching [0] a video of the behavior, 
> basically the screen stays black forever.

Another thing I vaguely recall is what is the power profile of your NVMe
device? Some draw too much power for the PinebookPro.

I had originally tested two different NVMe; one simply did not work at
all, and one did. There is some more information here:

  https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pinebook_Pro_Hardware_Accessory_Compatibility#NVMe_SSD_drives

There is a command nvmectl that you can use to adjust your NVMe to use a
lower power profile by default, but I have not experimented with it
recently, as I ended up just using the NVMe that did not draw much power
out-of-the-box. The high-performance ones, unsurprisingly, tend to draw
more power, so picking one that has a slower speed *might* help.

live well,
  vagrant

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