My 16 GB Milk-V Megrez arrived earlier this week. I had a spare sdcard for the OS image, but didn't have an SSD to install everything on. I went out and bought that today, and hooked everything up using my dying desktop's power supply (650w is overkill for this board).
It booted off the sdcard, and I partitioned the SSD and copied everything over. I manually modified /etc/fstab and /etc/default/u-boot on the SSD to point to the new filesystems, ran u-boot-update inside a chroot, and popped the sdcard.
I did it this way instead of dd'ing the image to the SSD as described in the docs because I wanted a larger swap partition. I wonder if this system supports suspend/hibernate (added to Linux 6.4 for RISC-V).
I/O isn't fast, but it'll work:
# hdparm -t --direct /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 1020 MB in 3.00 seconds = 339.89 MB/sec
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The board has an M2 slot, but it's for SATA, not NVMe. I had a cheap PCIe to NVMe adapter, so I installed a 1 TB drive on it, and repeated the above exercise to boot off that. The boot order appears to be sdcard, nvme/pci, ssd.
# hdparm -t --direct /dev/nvme0n1
/dev/nvme0n1:
Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 1570 MB in 3.00 seconds = 523.25 MB/sec
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I'm not sure if it's because the motherboard has a slow PCIe slot (it's PCIe Gen 3) or my adapter is slow.
#milkv #megrez #riscv