Success Transitioning From RPi 4 to RPi 5 w/ SSD

[gentoo_ram]

Just wanted to say thanks to the Gentoo community for documenting how to get Gentoo working on the Raspberry Pi 4 and now 5. I received my Pi 5 (8G) a couple weeks ago and transitioned my working Gentoo setup from a Pi 4 (8G). I'm happy to report I was able to make a copy of my Pi 4 SDCard onto a new SDCard and come up with only a couple changes. I made sure I had the Pi 5 firmware files and added the Pi 5 dtb file to the boot directory. That allowed me to have a working Pi 5 on SDCard very quickly.

I just received a new HAT+ PCIe SSD attachment and added a 1TB SSD to my Pi 5. For the new media I created a 512mb FAT boot partition, an 8GB swap partition, and left the rest for LVM. I then copied the LVM configuration I have been running on my x86 Gentoo box for years and copied the Pi 5 files from the SDCard onto the SSD. I'm happy to report I have a working Pi 5 booting off the SSD that runs an LVM storage configuration. It requires an initramfs created by dracut to load the root volume on LVM. Needless to say, a Pi 5 running on an SSD is significantly faster than a Pi 4 running on SDCard.

I compiled the Raspberry Linux kernel 6.7.5 using the same configuration on both devices. The Pi 4 is boosted to 1.8GHz; the Pi 5 is boosted to 2.8 GHz. Same 8G of RAM on both; using my same custom kernel configuration on both devices. The only difference being the Pi 5 build has 16k pages enabled. The Pi5+SSD build took 40.5 minutes. The Pi4+SDCard build took 119 minutes.

If you have the chance, using an SSD on the Pi 5 is a game-changer. I run my Pi devices headless and log in remotely so I can't talk about graphics configurations. But if anyone has questions about my working configuration, bring it on!