USB Experiments (KV260)
A small adventure
February 1, 2025 — posted by 
USB Experiments With My AMD Kria KV260
As an owner of an AMD Kria KV260 board, I've been on a hell-bent on finding a more reliable alternative to crappy NAND (USB drives, SD cards) for 24/7 use. Just thought I'd leave some notes with respect to some of the tests that I've run on this board—hopefully it should save you/a friend some time.
Preamble
I began by going through AMD's documentation, which states that the Kria KV260 (starter board) has only one officially supported boot method (SD card). It also supports USB drives, which I confirmed with a cheap-o Kingston DataTraveler. Though, as mentioned previously: this was more of a stop-gap sol., and I found myself revisiting the issue with my USB drive on its last legs. Just to get things to boot, I temporarily re-installed the SD card that I'd originally used with the board, and fired it up.
This brings me to the elephant in the room: USB SATA enclosures. Some support UASP, some don't—they all seem to have a hodgepodge of different features (some SSD enclosures being sold don't even have TRIM!). Anyway, the board makes it very clear to you when it doesn't like a particular SSD (SATA) enclosure. For those enclosures, booting requires attaching your device a serial port, restarting the USB controller, and waiting patiently for the USB device list to re-enumerate.
Tested SATA Enclosures
In all, I've tested 3 SATA enclosures:
| Device/Model Name | Vendor | USB/SATA Bridge (Controller) | Ordered From | Working? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "KingData" ENC3A11 | Realtek Semiconductor | RTL9201 | Amazon.ca | NO1 |
| "Orico" 25PW1 | JMicron Technology Corp. | JMS576 | CanadaComputers.com | NO1 |
| "UGREEN" 50743 | ASMedia | ASM235CM | Amazon.ca | YES |
The latter (ASMedia) enclsoure was something I stumbled upon on James Chambers' site (which has a helpful article abt. USB-SATA boot compatibility for RPi CM4). Interestingly, this sort of coincided with my experience w/ the Kria KV260 (ARM)—ASMedia drives seemed to have the highest success rate for USB boot.
At Last
After having burned through two other enclosures, I stumbled across the last tested enclosure (based on the ASM235). I formatted the drive, "dd"'ed the contents of my KV260's SD card over, and plugged it in. I was finally able to get past the bootloader, into Linux:
root@kria:~# lsusb Bus 002 Device 004: ID 174c:235c ASMedia Technology Inc. Ugreen Storage Device
Even more exciting was the boot screen (over serial):
Final Thoughts
Well, as usual—with the right hardware (USB-SATA enclosure), it's perfectly possible to boot the AMD Kria KV260 from a USB-SATA bridge (without having to tamper with the SOM itself, and adding your own SATA compat.). Theoretically, you could run a NAS/the like with the board, but I wouldn't recommend it. The SOM included w/ the Kria board only has 4 GB of memory (RAM), so you won't be doing anything super intensive here.
TL;DR: I'd recommend trying an ASM235-based enclosure, or checking out James' community-created compatibility list. Now, I get to run my small logging server, 24/7 :-)
No more plugging into serial, setting the baud rate to 115200, and manually resetting the USB controller in the bootloader just to boot from an attached SSD!
Added Bonus: YABS (Yet-Another-Benchmark-Script)
To test stability (mainly for the USB enclosure), I ran a quick yabs.sh to stress the system:
root@kria:~# curl -sL https://yabs.sh | bash -s -- -g
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
# Yet-Another-Bench-Script #
# v2025-01-01 #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
Sun Feb 2 03:52:43 UTC 2025
ARM compatibility is considered *experimental*
Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Uptime : 0 days, 0 hours, 6 minutes
Processor : Cortex-A53
CPU cores : 4 @ 1333.3330 MHz
AES-NI : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM : 3.8 GiB
Swap : 0.0 KiB
Disk : 938.9 GiB
Distro : Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS
Kernel : 5.15.0-1041-xilinx-zynqmp
VM Type : NONE
IPv4/IPv6 : ✔ Online / ❌ Offline
IPv4 Network Information:
---------------------------------
ISP : Bell Canada
ASN : AS577 Bell Canada
Host : Sympatico HSE
Location : Toronto, Ontario (ON)
Country : Canada
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/sda2):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 68.70 MB/s (17.1k) | 101.13 MB/s (1.5k)
Write | 68.66 MB/s (17.1k) | 104.14 MB/s (1.6k)
Total | 137.37 MB/s (34.3k) | 205.28 MB/s (3.2k)
| |
Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 129.11 MB/s (252) | 141.96 MB/s (138)
Write | 140.16 MB/s (273) | 158.39 MB/s (154)
Total | 269.27 MB/s (525) | 300.36 MB/s (292)
iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider | Location (Link) | Send Speed | Recv Speed | Ping
----- | ----- | ---- | ---- | ----
Clouvider | London, UK (10G) | 1.64 Gbits/sec | 629 Mbits/sec | 103 ms
Eranium | Amsterdam, NL (100G) | 1.18 Gbits/sec | 1.62 Gbits/sec | 111 ms
Uztelecom | Tashkent, UZ (10G) | 995 Mbits/sec | 355 Mbits/sec | 210 ms
Leaseweb | Singapore, SG (10G) | 653 Mbits/sec | 635 Mbits/sec | 262 ms
Clouvider | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 1.77 Gbits/sec | 1.19 Gbits/sec | 73.7 ms
Leaseweb | NYC, NY, US (10G) | 1.77 Gbits/sec | 1.91 Gbits/sec | 21.9 ms
Edgoo | Sao Paulo, BR (1G) | 1.17 Gbits/sec | 510 Mbits/sec | 155 ms
YABS completed in 3 min 51 sec
Footnotes
- Working = NO: When an SSD is recognized after the USB controller is reset in the bootloader.