Booting ARM Linux the standard way

#1

Post by MartijnBraam » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

Booting ARM Linux the standard way
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Re: Booting ARM Linux the standard way

#2

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:28 PM UTC

Some disconnected thoughts:

Title is misleading: Tow-Boot wants to become the standard way, but it isn't one today.

There's going to be a lot of resistance to distros shipping a binary they didn't build from source. It might work if you could ship Tow-Boot on the hardware and make it optional for the OS to care, but unless I've missed something OS integration is needed (if nothing else, because it has to share storage).

Why make a new thing, rather than improving upstream u-boot to cover as much as possible? Like... I would expect the existing u-boot project to be very much in favor of supporting all possible hardware and standardizing ex. LED colors to always mean the same thing.

Re: Booting ARM Linux the standard way

#3

Post by westurner » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:28 PM UTC

Fwiu, the magical path to launch Grub on an ARM board is:

  /boot/efi/debian/grubaa64.efi

And that doesn't quite require tow-boot to do hw init?

"DOC: How to boot into Grub" (in order to get a passphrase-protected graphical boot menu where you can modify kernel parameters like `rescue`) https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/issues/110

Re: Booting ARM Linux the standard way

#4

Post by als0 » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

Noble goal, but I want to point out that ARM recommends using UEFI as the standard way to boot. Then you can just boot whatever popular distro you want without weird tweaks. I’m not a fan of EFI but I think the downsides are less bad these days.

Re: Booting ARM Linux the standard way

#5

Post by MartijnBraam » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:40 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #2

Some disconnected thoughts: Title is misleading: Tow-Boot wants to become the standard way, but it isn't one today. There's going to be a lot of resistance to distros shipping a binary they didn't build from source. It might work if you could ship Tow-Boot on the hardware and make it optional for the OS to care, but unless I've missed something OS integration is needed (if nothing else, because it has to share storag…

Tow-Boot isn't the standard yet no, but it provides the standard EFI booting interface so it's at least somewhat true.

Distro's is shipping binaries that aren't build from source all the time, it's called firmware. Which is why this should probably be managed by fwupd, not packaged by distributions.

Re: Booting ARM Linux the standard way

#6

Post by MartijnBraam » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

als0 wrote: post #4

Noble goal, but I want to point out that ARM recommends using UEFI as the standard way to boot. Then you can just boot whatever popular distro you want without weird tweaks. I’m not a fan of EFI but I think the downsides are less bad these days.

This implements EFI.

Re: Booting ARM Linux the standard way

#7

Post by markstos » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #2

Some disconnected thoughts: Title is misleading: Tow-Boot wants to become the standard way, but it isn't one today. There's going to be a lot of resistance to distros shipping a binary they didn't build from source. It might work if you could ship Tow-Boot on the hardware and make it optional for the OS to care, but unless I've missed something OS integration is needed (if nothing else, because it has to share storag…

> There's going to be a lot of resistance to distros shipping a binary they didn't build from source.

Tow-Boot appears to be MIT Licensed. There appears to be nothing stopping them from building Tow-Boot from source.

Re: Booting ARM Linux the standard way

#8

Post by MartijnBraam » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:42 PM UTC

westurner wrote: post #3

Fwiu, the magical path to launch Grub on an ARM board is: /boot/efi/debian/grubaa64.efi And that doesn't quite require tow-boot to do hw init? "DOC: How to boot into Grub" (in order to get a passphrase-protected graphical boot menu where you can modify kernel parameters like `rescue`) https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/issues/110

putting a file in /boot/efi/debian/ won't do anything at all unless the specific board you have already has platform firmware onboard to actually make that work. Arm EBBR complicant server boards do this for example, this won't work for the vast majority of ARM single board computers though.

Re: Booting ARM Linux the standard way

#9

Post by MartijnBraam » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

markstos wrote: post #7

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #2

Some disconnected thoughts: Title is misleading: Tow-Boot wants to become the standard way, but it isn't one today. There's going to be a lot of resistance to distros shipping a binary they didn't build from source. It might work if you could ship Tow-Boot on the hardware and make it optional for the OS to care, but unless I've missed something OS integration is needed (if nothing else, because it has to share storag…

> There's going to be a lot of resistance to distros shipping a binary they didn't build from source. Tow-Boot appears to be MIT Licensed. There appears to be nothing stopping them from building Tow-Boot from source.

But distros's don't have to. On most hardware it should be possible to flash Tow-Boot to some form of on-board boot storage and after that the board Just Works(tm)

Re: Booting ARM Linux the standard way

#10

Post by ykedfgjhdfg » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:46 PM UTC

als0 wrote: post #4

Noble goal, but I want to point out that ARM recommends using UEFI as the standard way to boot. Then you can just boot whatever popular distro you want without weird tweaks. I’m not a fan of EFI but I think the downsides are less bad these days.

uefi isn't a piece of software, it's an interface.

tow-boot is one such implementation of this interface