Pomona is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.4 (Revision d03114) with 8GB RAM and a 1TB Samsung Portable SSD T5 running Void Linux.
The naming
Pomona was a goddess of fruitful abundance in ancient Roman religion and myth. Her name comes from the Latin word pomum, “fruit”, specifically orchard fruit.
Components
| Article | Price | Where from |
|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 4 Computer Model B, 8GB RAM | 76.90€ | BerryBase |
| Raspberry Pi Power Supply, USB-C, 5.1V / 3.0A | 7.90€ | BerryBase |
| Micro HDMI to HDMI adapter | 3.10€ | BerryBase |
| FLIRC case for Raspberry Pi 4 | 19.90€ | BerryBase |
| SAMSUNG Portable SSD T5, 1TB (blue) | 104.99€ | Saturn |
| TOTAL | 212.79€ |
Assembly
Straight forward, don’t forget to remove the foil from the thermal pad.
Setup
For the setup you need a MicroSD card that can fit a 2GB image.
As of 2021-06-23, Void Linux did not have rpi4 images ready, so I built one myself:
git clone https://github.com/void-linux/void-mklive
cd void-mklive
make
sudo ./mkrootfs.sh aarch64
sudo ./mkplatformfs.sh rpi4 void-aarch64-ROOTFS-20210623.tar.xz
sudo ./mkimage.sh -B 256MiB void-rpi4-PLATFORMFS-20210623.tar.xz
The resulting .img can be dumped raw on a MicroSD card.
After initial boot, we want to update the firmware and check EEPROM config:
git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom
cd rpi-eeprom
./rpi-eeprom-config
Check here that BOOT_ORDER contains 4 (USB mass storage boot):
BOOT_ORDER=0xf41
This was set already for my version.
Check for firmware updates:
./rpi-eeprom-update
*** UPDATE AVAILABLE ***
BOOTLOADER: update available
CURRENT: Thu Sep 3 12:11:43 PM UTC 2020 (1599135103)
LATEST: Thu Apr 29 04:11:25 PM UTC 2021 (1619712685)
VL805_FW: Using bootloader EEPROM
VL805: up to date
CURRENT: 000138a1
LATEST: 000138a1
Update the firmware:
./rpi-eeprom-update -a -d
reboot
After this, we can install the system to SSD. I just reused the same .img and grew the second partition to fill the whole disk.
Important: You need to adjust /boot/cmdline.txt on the SSD to use
the correct root=/dev/sda2, else you’ll just see a blinking cursor
on boot…
Remove the MicroSD card and it should boot from SSD. Be sure to use the blue USB3 port.
The SSD I use (Samsung Portable SSD T5, 1TB, 04e8:61f5) did not
require setting quirks and works fine (and boots fine) in UAS mode.
It was recommended to change the default scheduler to schedutil, so
add this to /etc/rc.local:
echo schedutil >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/scaling_governor
Benchmarks
- Temperature in the FLIRC case:
- Idle: 44-46°C
- Full load with GCC: 55°C
- 5min cpuburn-a53: 58°C