10-28-2019, 04:24 PM
(10-28-2019, 11:37 AM)bcnaz Wrote: Manipulating or modifying the 'uboot' is far above what I can do myself, so I will wait until there is a 'mainline' method to utilize the
PCIe/NVMe drive.
If you think about an x86 PC booting there's a chain of events where several operating systems load up one after another with each being more complex and featureful than the last until you eventually get a recognisable desktop for a user. A BIOS might be extremely basic, barely able to take keyboard input and display text on screen but it can read a sector off a SATA HDD. If that sector contains a bootloader that supports NVMe drives, encryption and pretty graphics then you can use that to load a more complex OS and eventually your user-facing OS. It was common practice back before UEFI came along to use a SATA drive to bootstrap from since nothing x86 supported directly booting off an NVMe drive at the lower levels.
With the pinebook pro we're saying the BIOS doesn't support booting off NVMe drives directly, but it will support booting off the eMMC. If we put something in the eMMC that understands how to boot off an NVMe drive we can use that to get a user facing OS up and running off the NVMe.