Booting ARM Linux in a standard way #ARM @tuxphones
Tow-Boot is a relatively new project for bringing some consistency to the way Linux is booted on ARM. This is both aimed at the Linux single board computers and the new wave of Linux phones.
On these devices the most common platform firmware is U-Boot. In some cases the U-Boot provided with the device is a nice and clean mainline U-Boot, in other cases it’s the U-Boot build provided by the manufacturer of the SoC.
One big difference between x86 computers and the ARM ecosystem is functionality that you’d expect from the bios/uefi in the hardware is actually in most cases part of the operating system that’s installed. This means there’s no consistency at all.
Getting to a boot menu on a normal computer is already a mess where you have to guess if you have to press Escape F10, F11, F12 or Delete. On ARM this is worse because this might depend on the operating system you have flashed at that moment.
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