ARM Posts Pictures Of AMD's New Development Board

[schmidtbag]

Geeze, where do you guys come up with this crap? Its an AMD ARM dev board, it'll probably coreboot... or any one of a dozen other arm bootloaders, like u-boot or lk... coreboot to GRUB? u-boot to GRUB?

There's no "coming up with this crap", it's inherently how the architecture is designed. Why do you think after roughly 20 years of ARM support for linux that there still isn't an easily updatable universal kernel for all ARM platforms like you find with x86? Why do you think there has never been an actual CMOS chip that operates a BIOS on any production ARM board? It's a RISC system and it was never intended to be used the way it is used today. I can't speak for coreboot since I've never used it, but uboot is extremely limiting, user-unfriendly, and in some cases, hardware specific. It's very easy to screw it up too. I also don't think GRUB will ever exist on ARM because there is no MBR. I suppose you could force GRUB to work, and I would definitely like to see it in action, but I have yet to see a practical working GRUB that works on any ARM platform.

You may think I'm being ridiculous but at least I've owned 5 different ARM systems (with another one on the way) and have looked into why there are so many hurdles.

Let me give you a simple example;
Google Nexus devices with Qualcomm SoC use lk bootloader, which provides TRIPLE-boot. "normal", "recovery", and "fastboot". Fastboot is a bare-bones low level USB interface for fixing stuff when all else is broken. Normal and recovery modes each boot a linux kernel. In fact, they boot a DIFFERENT linux kernel. Ok, well maybe not necessarily different, but different copies of it, each with a different ramdisk.

Things you can do right now;
1) Alter the partition table.
2) Swap out the linux kernel in normal or recovery for a different payload, like GRUB.
3) Boot whatever the hell you want.

I don't see what triple booting has to do with anything regarding what I said. My point was that with whatever ARM device you use, you're restricted to a handful of available compatible kernels and distros that support it. You can't just install any ARM-compatible distro you want, not without some serious headaches.

[CrystalGamma]

Hey, lack of BIOS/UEFI is a relief!

My initial interest for ARM computers was actually to escape the UEFI/secureboot nightmare, after an overload of bad experience, having to give up UEFI on 2 different new comuters, one of them even having a buggy BIOS too.

Uboot just works.

Sure, if there is a port for your platform, running the bootloader from bare metal yourself is great. But that port needs to exist, otherwise your board is little more than an expensive brick.

[andreano]

Sure, if there is a port for your platform, running the bootloader from bare metal yourself is great. But that port needs to exist, otherwise your board is little more than an expensive brick.

Yes, I think most boards require distros to ship a board-specific Uboot. I'm currently using my Hackberry A10 as a brick for that reason. But my Nitrogen6x has Uboot on a separate chip. If I'm not mistaken, it only requires an ext4 filesystem on the microSD card (too bad it didn't boot from SATA as advertised). It does require a funny "6x_bootscript" file though, for setting up the screens and stuff. It has device tree support in mainline, but how the right device tree gets selected during boot, is a mystery to me, so I don't know if distros have to ship that very setting, which would seem to me like defeating the purpose of device trees.

The day when distros are able to support any board that has a device tree, will be great for sure.