[megous]

> And Rockchip SoCs have a quite decent track record of not only supporting mainline linux but even running without proprietary firmware - as does their current top level SoC (RK3399, featured in Pine64's ROCKPro64).

Last time I tried, RK3399 was dog slow to boot on Pinebook Pro (only thanks to https://gitlab.com/DeltaGem/levinboot is this changing) and development once Google stopped doing it seems almost entirely stagnant. Just look at ATF history, or U-Boot history, etc.

Pinebook Pro doesn't suspend to ram to this day. Only whatever Google implemented for their chromebooks works.

[CameronNemo]

My PBP with mostly stock uboot and kernel boots in ~15 seconds.

Not great (especially without s2ram) but not 'dog slow' in my opinion.

No altmode typec in mainline is a big issue for me. Very sad that there is no usable video output.

[megous]

U-Boot has no business taking > 1-2s to boot PBP. More than that is kinda ridiculous. I was shocked seeing it take 8s when I first booted Manjaro. (My allwinner boards boot in ~2s, and those are all way slower than RK3399) With some older levinboot version, PBP boots to initramfs FDE password prompt in ~4s [1]. It's probably even faster now. I wish it would take 2s to that prompt, because then I can open PBP, enter password right away, and then just do something else waiting for the desktop to load. But 3-4s is already pretty nice.

[1] https://xnux.eu/log/#015

At least suspend to idle works as a sort of replacement for suspend to ram. PBP can stay for long enough in that state, so it's usable on the go even without suspend to RAM.

[mswann]

Haven't heard of levinboot yet, LGTM, thanks for the hint! Where do you get your entropy from? Does levinboot provide some (enough?) to the kernel? Right now I delay booting via a sleep in the initramfs so that I have time to randomly press as many keys as possible to get crng initialized before cryptsetup is called. Configuring my U-Boot build to provide entropy to the kernel is still on my to do list, haven't looked into it yet and don't know whether it already does or not. At least last time I checked I observed that KASLR didn't work due to missing entropy (the artificial delay won't work here as KASLR happens way before calling init).

[megous]

It's in the feature list: https://gitlab.com/DeltaGem/levinboot

> providing entropy to the kernel (KASLR and RNG seeds) via the DTB

I might as well add this feature to p-boot too. :)