Guide to migrating from eMMC to NVMe SSD?

Mixtile Blade 3 (Mixtile Cluster Box)
#1

Hi everyone,

Is there any good guide out there detailing the considerations and the best approach to migrate from on-board Blade 3 eMMC to Cluster Box-installed NVMe SSD?

(e.g. the hardware-switchable boot options appear to be eMMC, micro-SD, SPI Flash or MaskROM - is a trick needed such as on Raspberry Pi, whereby rather than switching entirely to SSD, instead an eMMC boot-loader/partition is still needed but which indicates to use a partition on the SSD as the root filesystem?)

Are there also guides to building and installing a new custom kernel, and replacing/updating the boot-loader(s)?

Finally, are the documents, sources and configurations available such that if someone wanted to rebuild the BMC image with the latest OpenWRT packages installed (which are too large in total to fit into the writable BMC overlayfs), this could be done also?

#2

Hi, Srcshelton.
The scheme you mentioned is feasible.
We currently lack the necessary resources to proceed with it. Implementing this plan may require some time.

#3

@srcshelton why do you prefer booting from SSD than eMMC ?

BMC sources are here GitHub - mixtile-rockchip/mixtile-clusterbox-mt7620a-openwrt

#4

Raised Build failure on ubuntu:20.04 · Issue #1 · mixtile-rockchip/mixtile-clusterbox-mt7620a-openwrt · GitHub as the BMC code fails to build for me on the recommended distro.

@silopolis I’m happy enough to have an eMMC-based boot-partition which then runs the system from SSD, but for controlling the usage of limited write-cycles to the eMMC as well as overall performance, using any present SSD to its fullest seems to be the best strategy, no?

I’d also like to experiment with different Linux distros, and I’m much happier that I’ll have success in repartitioning an SSD rather than internal eMMC without breaking anything!