Installing Debian 12 Bookworm RockPro64 on NVME

For few last days I've been playing with RockPro64 in attempts to install standard upstream Debian Bookworm on it using standard Debian installer and I succeeded.

To accomplish it I used custom U-Boot to run Debian installer from USB stick:

I used PCI-E adaptor for NVME WD Black SN 750 250G:

One of the main tricks was to install /boot partition on SD card this way from Debian Installer:

As you can see I used ext2 partition on SD card for /boot partition. It does not cause any performance issues and significantly simplifies our lives.

Finally, I got completely working Debian using upstream / vanilla Debian installer:

Previously I tried using U-Boot in SPI with USB boot support but it was unable to start from my USB-3 SSD / SATA disk for some reasons. I think it was some kind of issue with Debian installer as installation on USB is quite unusual and I do not blame it for failing.

Running RockPro64 from NVME is tricky too and I had no U-Boot with such capability to flesh SPI with it.

What is the point to use NVME? Look, perfornance.

Compare SD performance:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10000 iflag=direct

10000+0 records in

10000+0 records out

10485760000 bytes (10 GB, 9.8 GiB) copied, 454.419 s, 23.1 MB/s

With NVME:

dd if=/dev/nvme0n1p2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10000 iflag=direct

10000+0 records in

10000+0 records out

10485760000 bytes (10 GB, 9.8 GiB) copied, 15.994 s, 656 MB/s

With SATA SSD attached via USB-3 adaptor:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10000 iflag=direct

10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes (10 GB, 9.8 GiB) copied, 32.7685 s, 320 MB/s