Silly idea perhaps...

[Gwen Nelson]

Hey

I'm mainly opening this issue as a note for myself to implement, but basically how about a setup like this:

1 - wire the SD card's pins from GPIO to a permanently mounted chip on the pi
2 - at startup, after bootcode.bin has been loaded and is in RAM, use another GPIO pin to switch off the chip and enable the SD slot

This will have the effect of basically becoming like the BIOS chip in a PC.

I've also looked into NAND and SPI boot, which is allegedly supported by the pi but haven't found any information on how this works in detail, including what format the bootcode must be in (FAT filesystem vs just a blob of code for example).

Allegedly the SoC even supports I2C boot, but this has even less information available.

Feedback on this idea is most welcome.