On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Edward Lukacs wrote: > For people like me, it would be a huge service if ARM could publish some > more basic information about the fundamentals of booting. I am learning > about uboot, but it is a generic bootloader and I have no idea how it fits > when working with an ARM-based system.
The basics of booting on ARM is that the CPU has a bootrom that loads further stage bootloaders that eventually load an OS. The details of these are dependent on the CPU and the device in question. Some devices will have locked bootloaders, others will not. Some devices use u-boot, some more recent devices use UEFI and others have a custom bootloader. For devices that by default run Android, the best you can get is often some form of chroot running under the Android version of the Linux kernel, although this is changing as more ARM devices become supported by Linux mainline, some info about that was at the recent Android microconference at the Linux Plumbers Conference. With more skills you can hack up ways to run Debian without the Android userland but with the Android version of the Linux kernel still. https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/656324/fb12154c77eb3125/ http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2012/12/03/debian-mobile/ All this will probably improve as the ARM hardware community transitions to standardising on UEFI and ACPI, though there will probably always be devices using other things I guess. For specific help with your ARM-based devices I'd suggest joining the debian-arm mailing list and or IRC channel. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
