Is it possible to flash the OS on to the nvme drive and to boot from it instead? If so, how can I do that?
Hey ImLagging,
Thanks for the note!
Right now, with the existing Qualcomm boot firmware (their ARM “BIOS” equivalent — Qualcomm calls it UEFI), there isn’t support for booting directly from NVMe. A newer version of that firmware does add it, and once we’ve got the updated/open-sourced firmware in place we’ll share instructions so you can experiment with NVMe boot yourself.
It’s also worth mentioning that the internal storage on Tachyon is UFS, which runs through a SCSI driver and is already very fast and reliable. One of the big reasons we haven’t pushed hard on NVMe usage at the moment is because we’re not stuck on an SD card like some other boards - the built-in UFS gives plenty of throughput and reliability for most projects before you hit edge-case limits.
Thanks again for digging into this - we'll loop back on this note when support is pushed!
Cheers,
Nick
Thanks for the reply. I’ll keep an eye out for any announcements for this.
As for my use case, it’s mainly that I prefer replaceable storage as my boot media. I’ve had enough hard drives, SSD’s and other storage media fail over the years that I don’t like to trust something I can’t replace. For devices like the Tachyon, I like to use the on board storage to do periodic backups of important files/configs/etc and replaceable storage as the main OS drive. There’s a good chance the tachyon will end up in a very warm to hot environment, so heat may play a factor in the longevity of the storage (and I realize the rest of the device may be just as susceptible as well). So yet another reason for me to want to use replaceable storage.