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by zozbot234 1395 days ago
Would it be possible to flash Tow-Boot to that sector and only use the rest of the partition as actual data storage? It seems like it would effectively work the same as having a separate SPI hardware chip on-device, while also restoring distribution independence. The downside is that implementing this might require some special-case support though it could likely be implemented most conveniently by using, e.g. dm-linear, so only configuration changes would be needed, not new kernel code.
1 comments
MartijnBraam 1395 days ago
The issue with that is it's really easily wiped or changed when installing an OS. In the end the SPI hardware did get added and it just works, it's by far the simplest and most reliable solution.
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zozbot234 1395 days ago
> In the end the SPI hardware did get added and it just works

What about their new PineBook Pro, though? Is that situation still in flux?

> The issue with that is it's really easily wiped or changed when installing an OS.

I'm not really seeing this. If the OS supports this special scheme, they need only deal with the soft block device that's created by mapping "the rest" of the partition. And if they don't, then all bets are off anyway.

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MartijnBraam 1395 days ago
It seems like in the end the pinebook pro did get the SPI chip on it, but then they flashed a closed source U-Boot to the eMMC instead which does not allow booting from SD. So it's again a complete pain for the other distributions to help these users.

For the wiping issue, a lot of times I see suggestions to wipe the first few MB of the storage when there's booting and flashing issues to get rid of an old U-Boot, which is exactly what you don't want in the Tow-Boot case.

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dTal 1394 days ago
>a closed source U-Boot

U-Boot is GPL. How is this possible?

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zozbot234 1395 days ago
So the SPI chip is effectively useless? Is this something that could be fixed in a newer hardware revision?
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CameronNemo 1395 days ago
Not useless, but users will need to manually flash tow-boot when that should just be the default. If Pine64 had made better moves, their customers would have never had to worry about firmware or bootloaders, only which (standard) distro install media to use.
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