Booting a Rasberry Pi from a USB Drive

Motivation

Kind of late in my build and design process I started catching on to two facts : microSD cards don’t survive high IO loads and k8s creates high IO loads. Rasberry Pis do support USB boot, there’s just a few steps required to make it happen.

Parts List

Update the Kernel

Note: This may not be strictly necessary, howevery it was a little tough for me to figure out if the current kernel on the device was enabled so I just went ahead and did it by default.

  1. Go get the Rasberry Pi Imager and flash a microSD Card using EEPROM image available under Misc utility images.
  2. Pop that microSD into your Rasberry Pi and wait at least 2 minutes for the update to occur. (The green light next to the power indicator will flash periodically.)

Do this for each of the nodes in your computer.

Flash the USB Drive

  1. Use the Rasberry Pi Imager to flash at least Ubuntu 20.10.
  2. Copy your user-data file over