SSD boot with uboot for raspberry pi 4

Hello, I am currently trying to build an OS, which should run on a raspberry pi 4. In order to do so I have created a configuration file, which also determines the MENDER_UBOOT_STORAGE_INTERFACE to be the integrated ssd on my raspberry pi. After building the image and flashing the ssd of the raspberrypi the output I get is: “Failed to open device ‘nvme’”. So my question is, is there an option for specifiying a ssd boot with uboot and do I have to consider any additional parameters for the configuration file? My configuration file currently looks like this:

#
# This file is your local configuration file and is where all local user settings
# are placed.

# Mender Update
# The name of the disk image and Artifact that will be built.
# This is what the device will report that it is running, and different updates must have different names
# because Mender will skip installation of an Artifact if it is already installed.
MENDER_ARTIFACT_NAME = "1.0"

INHERIT += "mender-full"
MENDER_FEATURES_ENABLE_append = " mender-uboot mender-image-sd"
MENDER_FEATURES_ENABLE_disable = " mender-growfs-data mender-systemd mender-grub mender-image-uefi"

# For U-Boot
MENDER_UBOOT_STORAGE_INTERFACE = "nvme"
MENDER_UBOOT_STORAGE_DEVICE = "0"

# Allows bitbake to execute multiple tasks at once.
# For a quadcore, BB_NUMBER_THREADS = "4", PARALLEL_MAKE = "-j 4" would
# be appropriate.
# Also, make can be passed flags so it run parallel threads e.g.:
BB_NUMBER_THREADS ?= "${@oe.utils.cpu_count() * 2}"
PARALLEL_MAKE ?= "-j ${@oe.utils.cpu_count() * 2}"

# A MACHINE integrated with Mender.
# raspberrypi3, raspberrypi4, beaglebone-yocto, vexpress-qemu and qemux86-64 are reference boards
MACHINE = "raspberrypi4-64"
# MEND_STORAGE_DEVICE ignored if mender-partuuid is enabled
MENDER_STORAGE_DEVICE = "/dev/sdb"
# USB with 4GiB of storage.
MENDER_STORAGE_TOTAL_SIZE_MB = "4096"

MENDER_BOOT_PART = "${MENDER_STORAGE_DEVICE_BASE}1"
MENDER_DATA_PART = "${MENDER_STORAGE_DEVICE_BASE}4"
MENDER_ROOTFS_PART_A = "${MENDER_STORAGE_DEVICE_BASE}2"
MENDER_ROOTFS_PART_B = "${MENDER_STORAGE_DEVICE_BASE}3"

RPI_USE_U_BOOT = "1"

# Having the serial terminal enabled is useful.
ENABLE_UART = "1"

# Mender will build an image called `sdimg` which shall be used instead
# of the `rpi-sdimg`.
IMAGE_FSTYPES_remove = " rpi-sdimg"

# Use the same type here as specified in ARTIFACTIMG_FSTYPE to avoid
# building an unneeded image file.
SDIMG_ROOTFS_TYPE = "ext4"

# Increase rootfs size for raspberrypi build
MENDER_BOOT_PART_SIZE_MB = "64"

# The following settings to enable systemd are needed for all Yocto
# releases sumo and older.  Newer releases have these settings conditionally
# based on the MENDER_FEATURES settings and the inherit of mender-full above.
DISTRO_FEATURES_append = " systemd"
VIRTUAL-RUNTIME_init_manager = "systemd"
DISTRO_FEATURES_BACKFILL_CONSIDERED = "sysvinit"
VIRTUAL-RUNTIME_initscripts = "systemd-compat-units"

#
# Default policy config
#
# The distribution setting controls which policy settings are used as defaults.
# The default value is fine for general Yocto project use, at least initially.
# Ultimately when creating custom policy, people will likely end up subclassing
# these defaults.
#
DISTRO ?= "poky"

#
# Package Management configuration
#
# This variable lists which packaging formats to enable. Multiple package backends
# can be enabled at once and the first item listed in the variable will be used
# to generate the root filesystems.
# Options are:
#  - 'package_deb' for debian style deb files
#  - 'package_ipk' for ipk files are used by opkg (a debian style embedded package manager)
#  - 'package_rpm' for rpm style packages
# E.g.: PACKAGE_CLASSES ?= "package_rpm package_deb package_ipk"
# We default to rpm:
PACKAGE_CLASSES ?= "package_rpm"

#
# Extra image configuration defaults
#
# The EXTRA_IMAGE_FEATURES variable allows extra packages to be added to the generated
# images. Some of these options are added to certain image types automatically. The
# variable can contain the following options:
#  "dbg-pkgs"       - add -dbg packages for all installed packages
#                     (adds symbol information for debugging/profiling)
#  "src-pkgs"       - add -src packages for all installed packages
#                     (adds source code for debugging)
#  "dev-pkgs"       - add -dev packages for all installed packages
#                     (useful if you want to develop against libs in the image)
#  "ptest-pkgs"     - add -ptest packages for all ptest-enabled packages
#                     (useful if you want to run the package test suites)
#  "tools-sdk"      - add development tools (gcc, make, pkgconfig etc.)
#  "tools-debug"    - add debugging tools (gdb, strace)
#  "eclipse-debug"  - add Eclipse remote debugging support
#  "tools-profile"  - add profiling tools (oprofile, lttng, valgrind)
#  "tools-testapps" - add useful testing tools (ts_print, aplay, arecord etc.)
#  "debug-tweaks"   - make an image suitable for development
#                     e.g. ssh root access has a blank password
# There are other application targets that can be used here too, see
# meta/classes/image.bbclass and meta/classes/core-image.bbclass for more details.
# We default to enabling the debugging tweaks.
EXTRA_IMAGE_FEATURES ?= "debug-tweaks"

#
# Additional image features
#
# The following is a list of additional classes to use when building images which
# enable extra features. Some available options which can be included in this variable
# are:
#   - 'buildstats' collect build statistics
#   - 'image-mklibs' to reduce shared library files size for an image
#   - 'image-prelink' in order to prelink the filesystem image
# NOTE: if listing mklibs & prelink both, then make sure mklibs is before prelink
# NOTE: mklibs also needs to be explicitly enabled for a given image, see local.conf.extended
USER_CLASSES ?= "buildstats image-mklibs image-prelink"

#
# Interactive shell configuration
#
# Under certain circumstances the system may need input from you and to do this it
# can launch an interactive shell. It needs to do this since the build is
# multithreaded and needs to be able to handle the case where more than one parallel
# process may require the user's attention. The default is iterate over the available
# terminal types to find one that works.
#
# Examples of the occasions this may happen are when resolving patches which cannot
# be applied, to use the devshell or the kernel menuconfig
#
# Supported values are auto, gnome, xfce, rxvt, screen, konsole (KDE 3.x only), none
# Note: currently, Konsole support only works for KDE 3.x due to the way
# newer Konsole versions behave
#OE_TERMINAL = "auto"
# By default disable interactive patch resolution (tasks will just fail instead):
PATCHRESOLVE = "noop"

#
# Disk Space Monitoring during the build
#
# Monitor the disk space during the build. If there is less that 1GB of space or less
# than 100K inodes in any key build location (TMPDIR, DL_DIR, SSTATE_DIR), gracefully
# shutdown the build. If there is less that 100MB or 1K inodes, perform a hard abort
# of the build. The reason for this is that running completely out of space can corrupt
# files and damages the build in ways which may not be easily recoverable.
# It's necesary to monitor /tmp, if there is no space left the build will fail
# with very exotic errors.
BB_DISKMON_DIRS ??= "\
    STOPTASKS,${TMPDIR},1G,100K \
    STOPTASKS,${DL_DIR},1G,100K \
    STOPTASKS,${SSTATE_DIR},1G,100K \
    STOPTASKS,/tmp,100M,100K \
    ABORT,${TMPDIR},100M,1K \
    ABORT,${DL_DIR},100M,1K \
    ABORT,${SSTATE_DIR},100M,1K \
    ABORT,/tmp,10M,1K"

#
# Qemu configuration
#
# By default native qemu will build with a builtin VNC server where graphical output can be
# seen. The line below enables the SDL UI frontend too.
PACKAGECONFIG_append_pn-qemu-system-native = " sdl"

# CONF_VERSION is increased each time build/conf/ changes incompatibly and is used to
# track the version of this file when it was generated. This can safely be ignored if
# this doesn't mean anything to you.
CONF_VERSION = "1"

# rpi-base.inc removes these as they are normally installed on to the
# vfat boot partition. To be able to update the Linux kernel Mender
# uses an image that resides on the root file system and below line
# ensures that they are installed to /boot
# Also Enable Docker
IMAGE_INSTALL_append = " docker-ce e2fsprogs-resize2fs bash kernel-image kernel-devicetree"
DISTRO_FEATURES_append = " virtualization"

# Include license
COPY_LIC_MANIFEST = "1"
COPY_LIC_DIRS = "1"
LICENSE_CREATE_PACKAGE = "1"

Hi @omzo,

have you stopped at the u-boot console and looked at the actual devices, respectively the boot scripts? I would not bet on this kind of support being enabled by default in all u-boot configurations, so chances are you have to add your integration there too.

Greetz,
Josef