Debian support for SPI/MTD on ARM?
Since some of the original eMMCs are starting to fail I decided to
give a more serious try to getting the nvme ssd in my Pinebook Pro
working. It's one of the Intel 1 TB ones. The first hurdle is
dealing with uboot but the more serious one is that the PBP relies on
putting something in SPI that hooks the nvme to boot. That doesn't
seem to be in Debian, maybe it just needs a custom kernel, but there
should be a /dev/mtd which gets created on boot when the driver finds
the SPI. I see none. The nvme works, but carefully copying an image
(2 tries) ends up with something that doesn't boot (from the nvme).
The PBP now ships with Manjaro partly as a workaround, or it can run
Android or Ubuntu or whatever but they've given up on Debian. I found
this Debian page https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/MTD but it
seems not ready for prime time "WARNING! DO NOT DO THIS ON REAL FLASH,
IT WRITES TO THE MEMORY WHICH IS PROBABLY REALLY DANGEROUS!!!" so I
didn't try it.
I'm still running the original mrfixit Debian Stretch eMMC, which I at
least backed up. I wonder if this could be done as a kernel module
for now. I'm not sure missing this bit of kernel is the only problem.
The nvme doesn't come standard in a PBP, you have add one, so not
everybody uses one.
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I already voted, leave me alone.
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