With this PR merged into master there is no need for step 5. anymore - as long as one builds an image from master themselves.
This will take some time to propagate to downloadable images though.
Kernel 5.x and nvme
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so then only the boot speed and nvme speed issues to get solved (I hope) to get it somewhat stable
As for nvme speed…
Did you use the gen2 overlay which is needed to enable, officially unsupported, Gen2 link speed?
You need to add the following line to /boot/armbianEnv.txt or adjust existing one.
You can do it from within the booted OS:
overlays=pcie-gen2
For boot speed I have some hacky patch from Ezequiel Garcia lying around my userpatches folder which makes boot fast again. I will try to merge it soon.
Hi @piter75
I tried to use the gen2 overlay configuration but had no effect …
Only then I realised that the branch you mentioned above disappeared (so i imagine its not merged).
in previous kernels i had around 400-500MBps for the supported gen 1 and 700-900 for gen2 (radxa stretch)
for context: I’m trying to achieve a somewhat stable system on top of a supported official image, as it will stay remote from me. so I rather have the supported gen1, but at the decent 400-500Mbps speed (the main purpose of the upgrade from the current Raspberrypi3)
about the boot speed, cool. I’ll wait for that patch to be merged (following here)
Its been merged. Found in pull requests.
The slower speed I cant say, @piter75 and other knowledge person can tell.
Well, I am not an expert on NVMe with Rock Pi 4 as I simply don’t have neither PCIe extension board nor standalone NVMe drive 
I merely helped to include the tweaks that @darp described into Armbian.
I think I must acquire myself another Rock Pi 4 with PCIe extension board solely for NVMe tests in Armbian
Is that…router?
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no, one of them is home automation, 1-wire, measurement, control, solar system over-production control, etc. another test/in reserve
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I did modify my U-boot slightly (see here Fixing U-boot to support boot from NVMEs) to support some of the SSDs that I have. With this change the boot is pretty fast. Under 30 seconds to see the login prompt.
As for the speed… here is one run that seems to be typical using the following command
fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --readwrite=randrw --rwmixread=75
DataRam
-----------
test: (g=0): rw=randrw, bs=(R) 4096B-4096B, (W) 4096B-4096B, (T) 4096B-4096B, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=64
fio-3.1
Starting 1 process
test: Laying out IO file (1 file / 4096MiB)
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [m(1)][100.0%][r=178MiB/s,w=58.8MiB/s][r=45.6k,w=15.1k IOPS][eta 00m:00s]
test: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=3478: Sat Nov 16 07:05:02 2019
read: IOPS=45.2k, BW=176MiB/s (185MB/s)(3070MiB/17403msec)
bw ( KiB/s): min=165576, max=184704, per=100.00%, avg=180934.65, stdev=3336.51, samples=34
iops : min=41396, max=46176, avg=45233.62, stdev=833.94, samples=34
write: IOPS=15.1k, BW=58.0MiB/s (61.8MB/s)(1026MiB/17403msec)
bw ( KiB/s): min=55032, max=62108, per=100.00%, avg=60473.24, stdev=1275.30, samples=34
iops : min=13758, max=15527, avg=15118.35, stdev=318.85, samples=34
cpu : usr=24.37%, sys=69.26%, ctx=16876, majf=0, minf=8
IO depths : 1=0.1%, 2=0.1%, 4=0.1%, 8=0.1%, 16=0.1%, 32=0.1%, >=64=100.0%
submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.1%, >=64=0.0%
issued rwt: total=785920,262656,0, short=0,0,0, dropped=0,0,0
latency : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=64
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
READ: bw=176MiB/s (185MB/s), 176MiB/s-176MiB/s (185MB/s-185MB/s), io=3070MiB (3219MB), run=17403-17403msec
WRITE: bw=58.0MiB/s (61.8MB/s), 58.0MiB/s-58.0MiB/s (61.8MB/s-61.8MB/s), io=1026MiB (1076MB), run=17403-17403msec
Disk stats (read/write):
nvme0n1: ios=778690/260197, merge=0/0, ticks=565565/252813, in_queue=12484, util=99.35%
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Hi
So I’m running now armbian 19.11.7 buster with kernel 5.4.8
I used to have transfer nvme speeds around 400-500 MBps with radxa stretch linux 4.4 (and 700ish on pcie gen 2)
In armbian it seems that the transfer rate is around half:
raleonardo@rockpi:~$ sudo hdparm -t --direct /dev/nvme0n1
/dev/nvme0n1:
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 590 MB in 3.01 seconds = 196.11 MB/sec
with overlays=pcie-gen2:
raleonardo@rockpi:~$ sudo hdparm -t --direct /dev/nvme0n1
/dev/nvme0n1:
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 1140 MB in 3.00 seconds = 379.61 MB/sec
I’m using a HP EX900 250GB NVMe
Do you have similar issues?