Will OSMC ever support USB boot?

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

What is the status of this please, i came back to try this again and find that the boot fails with Could not mont bootfs… so I assume the USB boot option is still not supported?

Thanks

2

Assuming you’re referring to Raspberry Pi, you can boot from USB, but you’ll need an SD card for the boot files.

I highlighted the necessary changes needed for a fully native USB boot some time ago and am happy to accept a PR, but no one seems interested.

3

I Apologise, yes I am I thought this post was in the RPi category, makes some sense as the MAC OSMC installer specifically allows USB Boot options.

Thanks
JohnW

4

All installers will allow “USB Boot” option as you can have the system written/booted from USB just the boot partition will remain on the SD Card.

5

However, i should have looked a little closer at that option on the MAC installer, if you select USB the installer then refuses to allow you to create the boot on the SSD that i have connected to the MAC specifically for this boot.

So worthless…

Also, the reference to "the boot partition remains on the SD " this is not strictly true i believe as the RPI OS does appear to work this way , does it?

6

The Installer is written to the SD Card you connect to the MAC. It then will write to the SDD connected to the RPI if you boot from that SD Card.

Yes RPI OS allows boot from USB without SD Card. OSMC could do the same but as Sam wrote someone need to program it.

7

Very interesting, just tried this and it appears to work, but as you say still needs SD card which in my opinion is the anomaly… where is the feature written up as there is nothign i can find on the Mac Loader.

Thanks for the heads up on this.
JohnW

8

@sam_nazarko I will be very happy to use this moment for me to make this PR and get this feature in to OSMC. Could you please point me in the direction of this list of changes needed you mention?

9

This would be the first thing to work on:

then we should adapt the target installer to support UUID based booting (cmdline.txt and /etc/fstab), as well as initramfs.

That should probably be sufficient for updates etc to work.