Will the Pine64 boot from a USB Flash drive?

[MrUmunhum]

Hi group,
The title says it all.  Dose the Pine64 support USB booting??
Also is there BIOS access?  Can the BIOS be modified through the console/keyboard?

[Luke]

It does not boot from a USB, you can however move rootfs to a USB drive or HDD. 
BIOS ? Not sure what you are asking about - this is a SBC.  Take a look here. You can modify parameters in the /boot partition. What are you trying to achieve ?

[xalius]

As far as I know A64 boots from either Flash, eMMC or SD-Card, the only thing that is possible via the OTG USB port is to boot into FEL mode for recovery. As Luke said, you can have your root filesystem on a USB device or even on a network share as long as you boot at least u-boot from Flash, eMMC or a SD-Card.

[tllim]

Sunxi just submit the uboot and SPL to mainline. This prepare in near future, PINE A64 will able to boot form USB Flesh.

[Luke]

Sunxi just submit the uboot and SPL to mainline. This prepare in near future, PINE A64 will able to boot form USB Flesh.

Pretty cool

[martinayotte]

Armbian build for Pine64 is already prepared for SPL USB-Boot. It requires a small SPI-NOR flash connected to the header and having u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin flashed into it.
Then, it can boot from USB drive.

[alevecchio]

I found this on Raspberry Pi 3. You can change the bootmode to boot directly from USB.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/documenta...des/msd.md
Is this possible on Pine64+?
Does the speed on the USB (maybe with a 3.0 drive on 2.0 interface) is faster than MicroSD cards?

[alevecchio]

I found this on Raspberry Pi 3. You can change the bootmode to boot directly from USB.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/documenta...des/msd.md
Is this possible on Pine64+?
Does the speed on the USB (maybe with a 3.0 drive on 2.0 interface) is faster than MicroSD cards?

You can move rootfs to a USB 2.0 drive and use that - if its a decent drive then it ought to be considerably faster than an average SD card. As for uboot, to my knowledge it needs to sit on a SD or eMMC. I belive that Lenny wrote up a tutorial long time ago, but couldnt find it ... if someone digs it up then please link it below.

I am running tests with sysbench to choose the SD card i will use. I will try with USB too. Does the SD card have influence on system speed with rootfs on USB? Or can i use a very basic one (class4) because will be used just for /boot?
I made some CPU tests and is much faster than Raspberry Pi 3. More than 10 times! I am setting up a simple LAMP server.

[Luke]

For a LAMP server moving to a USB stick is a good idea - for more reasons than one (but thats besides the point). As a side-note, I run a LAMP server too on a 512 board for over a year now and it works great.
No, having the bootloader on a slow card will not influence system performance (other than boot time by a sec or two? - not sure).
Also, you responded before I edited in the link to how to move rootfs to a USB stick - so see the edit.