Add support for 4K sectors

[timg236]

Describe the bug

Creating a placeholder issue to track official status of support for booting from drives with 4K native sector

• No guarantees on timeframe
• Pi5 only
• NVMe supports is highest priority - USB/SSD might come later
• Does not include changes to RPi OS or Imager to create 4K sector OS images.

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

Raspberry Pi

Device (s)

Raspberry Pi 5

Bootloader configuration.

n/a

System

No response

Bootloader logs

No response

USB boot

No response

NVMe boot

No response

Network (TFTP boot)

No response

[timg236]

The latest firmware should now support NVMe drives formatted with a sector size of 4K. We are looking at enhancing the USB firmware drivers to support 4K. RPi OS images are currently all 512 bytes per-sector, the priority is to get reliable 4K images with rpi-image-gen before adding this to RPi OS images.

There's no plans to add support for 4K sector support on Pi 4 / CM4 because that requires a much larger change to the old firmware file-system code.