---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Held Bier <lausgans@> Date: 2014/1/10 Subject: On a Samsung ARM Chromebook, could nv-uboot easily boot to stock linux kernels, by way of ARM-GRUB? To: subharo@, help-grub@
Hi, Subharo > one cannot boot from a stock linux kernel One can, but Samsung ARM Chromebook is not fully supported by mainline kernel. At least you'll miss wi-fi.You have few options here: take a mainline kernel and apply all the fixes that you need from kernel tree at Chromium project, or search if someone else have already done that. That will be helpful for the whole Linux community, if you or someone else will try to push needed fixes upstream. > One currently must "borrow" the ChromeOS kernel It's the kernel with best support for this machine. If you're trying to avoid using Google's blobs, you may take the tree code from https://chromium.googlesource.com/ instead (chromiumos/third_party/kernel -b release-R31-4731.B is what stable Chrome OS uses atm) instead, which you're free to investigate prior usage (an old building guide http://people.redhat.com/wcohen/chromebook/chrome_kernel.txt is mostly right). You'll still need few proprietary components to get full hw support: 1) Mali GPU userland driver; 2) Wi-Fi firmware; 3) HW videocodec firmware (highly optional). > and "sign" it Besides booting of dev-keys signed images you may choose other options: 1) replacing of stock u-boot with nv-u-boot (cracking of Chromebook required); 2) setting a chain-loaded nv-u-boot. You may then boot usual non-u-boot images with help of kexec (like Luke suggested). > The Debian folks are currently stuck on how to boot a stock linux kernel from > nv-u-boot I doubt they're stuck. The wiki way is just the most easy and fast. I had no problems in booting Linux from nv-u-boot, and there is nothing distro-special about it. For Google's nv-u-boot you're just making a combined image of exynos5250 device tree and your kernel in form of zImage, and then booting it. > as compared to, say, the much more mature and familiar GRUB > There is a version of GRUB for ARM: http://sourceforge.net/projects/arm-grub/ I'm not sure that ARM version is that mature and stable as it's x86 counterpart. I've also never heard of it being used by default on any commercial ARM device. Redboot and U-boot are mostly used by the ARM hardware you'll find on market, and they're used to directly boot into the OS. You're seem to be a man of your own habits. GRUB and other 2-nd stage loaders are helpful on PC, where BIOS (and now EFI) knows little about how to boot into OS. Contrary, on ARM, the 1-nd stage loaders which are a firmware at same time are used in most, and it's an easier to learn it's ecosystem, than try to put an unneeded middleware. -- 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/canoehn85mes_-z8w9zpqyfypnsquzcnhxbbedjfjvszlags...@mail.gmail.com
