subharo, hi, basically you've been caught out by the use of treacherous computing, and have purchased a product that you cannot and will not ever own. the samsung processors have bootloader-signing actually built-in to the ROM: once the e-fuses are fired and the private key installed in EEPROM there is no way to gain control of the machine short of paying someone tens of thousands of dollars to have the top taken off the processor in a class 1 cleanroom and to use lasers to dig around, hunt for and re-build the e-fuse. and then put the plastic back.
actually, there *might* be a cheaper way: obtain a replacement processor, pay for the treacherous one to be removed and have the "stock" one soldered in its place (and then blow the e-fuse which permanently disables treacherous computing). as this would involve heating up the board to around 200C and these SoCs have a hell of a lot of pins it is not without risk. but, without going down that insane route, you are along the right kind of lines with loading a 2nd bootloader - one that can then load an unsigned kernel. there is potentially a simpler option: you might wish to look at the kexec option. this would allow you to continue to use the *existing* kernel - unmodified - purely as a bootloader. there is a userspace program kicking around which allows selection of kernels (heck, you could even try using grub in userspace). modify /sbin/init (or other method) to run that userspace "kernel-selector", then that userspace kernel-selector-program will kexec the *actual* kernel that you require, which can, of course, be anything you want. regarding the custom-compiled packages: yep... tough. that's how things are in the ARM world. i won't say "get used to it"... instead i'll say "please *consider* getting used to it" :) there is no BIOS: *every* kernel is custom-compiled and hard-coded to match the hardware... which, because there is no BIOS, and all the CPUs are different *and* all the hardware is different.... you see how that quickly becomes a complete nightmare? so.... yeah, if someone's already done custom-compiled packages then you are very, very lucky. l. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-arm-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAPweEDyyfQRgredyzcaVWO8bRqENFq+2=hnryua9cxpe1fu...@mail.gmail.com
