As the title says, I would like to boot from a thunderbolt 3 nvme enclosure. I can mount the drive in linux using the normal ectool command. But I am wondering if I could do the same thing at boot (perhaps using the ccd with another computer? its clunky but if it works it works). The only other thing I could think of would be a uefi based replacement for ectool but that would be a lot of development that I don’t know how to do. I imagine the firmware doesn’t include a thunderbolt driver either.
I imagine for booting linux you could put the kernel and initramfs somewhere else and integrate ectool into the initramfs so you get
mrchromebox UEFI → Linux → initramfs → ectool switches port to thunderbolt → rootfs on tb drive is mounted and booted as normal by the loaded kernel
A potentially more elegant solution would be
mrchromebox UEFI → Linux → initramfs → ectool switches port to thunderbolt → boot partition on tb drive is mounted and the distro provided kernel is started with kexec
I assume that the port would stay in tb mode as kexec doesn’t trigger a reboot.
Booting windows seems a lot harder since it doesn’t support kexec and the thunderbolt drivers are proprietary. Unfortunately that was my intended usecase. Also, unlike Linux windows needs the drive to be accessible in firmware as the actual windows kernel lives on the system volume. In that case I imagine the only solution would be to have the tb enclosure initialized by the firmware and available as a regular uefi block device.