seandepagnier Posted September 20, 2017 Share Posted September 20, 2017 I notice there is a 16mb spi flash on the bottom of my orange pi zero. I read it is possible to boot off it. Has anyone done it, and is it useful? Is it possible to run without the sd card? I am interested in locking the sdcard to read only for reliability during power loss, and storing application configuration data to the spi flash if possible. Can it be mounted with a filesystem, or is it better to use a ramdisk and store it periodically to flash? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
martinayotte Posted September 20, 2017 Share Posted September 20, 2017 If you are talking about having Armbian full image stored in that SPI_NOR, no, it is too small ... But, an OpenWRT image would fit . If you are talking about just placing a U-Boot loader there and booting from USB, yes, it have been done before. Unfortunately, it seems that current u-Boot is currently broken for USB boot right now. But it is possible to use older Apritzel u-boot, I've one built back in May and still working to boot from an USB HDD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
seandepagnier Posted September 20, 2017 Author Share Posted September 20, 2017 what about mounting the flash as a filesystem? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zador.blood.stained Posted September 21, 2017 Share Posted September 21, 2017 10 hours ago, seandepagnier said: what about mounting the flash as a filesystem? I would not recommend doing that, it has relatively low write speed and may have less erase cycles than usual NAND or SD/eMMC. In theory you could mount something like ubifs (and partitioning the flash before) but I would also not recommend doing it on the 3.4.x kernel. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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