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Raspberry Pi 4 PCI Express: It actually works! USB3, SATA... GPUs?
Recently, Tomasz Mloduchowski posted a popular article on his blog detailing the steps he undertook to get access to the hidden PCIe interface of Raspberry Pi 4: the first Raspberry Pi to include PCIe in its design. After seeing his post, and realizing I was meaning to go buy a Raspberry Pi 4, it just seemed natural to try and replicate his results in the hope of taking it a bit further. I am known for Raspberry Pi Butchery, after all.
What follows is a step-by-step guide to how he made it work. Setting up for remote operation, Desoldering the USB3 chip, soldering ultra-fine wires to the exposed pads using a microscope, a few reboot attempts requiring "professional" wiggling of the PCIe slot, hacking the Linux device tree to extend the bus ID limits, and some linux driver hacking, too. The article is filled with pictures and screen caps. He closes out the article listing the devices that were made available (using lspci) and then mentioning:
I also have tried some other fairly hilarious setups, including the following with a Radeon HD 7990 GPU, and another with a GTX 1060.
Even if you are not a hardware or software hacker, the pictures of his efforts along the way, culminating with a huge GPU in a PCI slot attached to a wee little Raspberry Pi 4 are worth the read.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Monday October 14 2019, @05:00PM
While I won't hold my breath, I would love to see the PCIe interface exposed in the CM4 boards. That would make a pi4 cluster a lot more attractive.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base