SSD pi 4 boot beta applied - now: how to prepare ubuntu 20.04

[xb77]

Hi,
I just took a sd card to apply the beta bootloader on my pi.
Booting from an ssd or usb device with rasperrian (replacing elf and dat files) works fine.
But I'm not able to get an ubuntu up and running. Any hints?
Regards, xb

[timg236]

IIRC Ubuntu uses u-boot which will need updating with USB-MSD support. Other distributions are unlikely to work until the beta firmware is moved to a production release so that they can package a complete solution.

[xb77]

Now I did this tip with removing 2nd and 1st partition and using the sd only booting from ssd.
viewtopic.php?f=131&t=268476&sid=dee0cf ... 1bd2ea09cc

When I only want to have the ssd because of limited lifetime of sd card, is that method good? Only booting from sd card or is the boot partition used more than just in a boot?

[lingon]

It can be done as is discussed in this thread viewtopic.php?f=131&t=268476, but at the moment it is a hack involving error prone manual work. And whenever the kernel is updated it needs to be decompressed manually.

After flashing the USB MSD capable eeprom boot code you need to do the following steps:

Install an Ubuntu image on your SSD

Mount the Ubuntu SSD from a SD-card running Raspbian.

Copy fixup4.dat and start4.elf to the Ubuntu /boot partition.

Disable Uboot in the boot process according to the instructions in the thread.

Uncompress the Ubuntu kernel and change Ubuntus /boot/config.txt to boot that kernel and the corresponding ramdisk.

[JonG]

When I only want to have the ssd because of limited lifetime of sd card, is that method good? Only booting from sd card or is the boot partition used more than just in a boot?

I believe that this method avoids the SD lifetime issues due to writing to the SD. Files are read from the SD /boot directory on startup, and then all system activity is passed on to the SSD.