[opensuse-arm] Switching to EFI on ARM (slowly)
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Hi, One of the pain points we've had on the ARM openSUSE distributions was that we were always generating a u-boot boot.script that would just point to /boot/uImage /boot/initrd, so you would always get the latest (possibly broken) kernel after an update and you couldn't modify the kernel command line easily. The usual way we boot on other architectures is to have grub2 help you out with this. Grub2 provides easy interfaces to select a kernel on boot, modify kernel command lines, allows for booting from btrfs snapshots etc. To get you to this glory on ARM, we've added EFI support to U-Boot. So U-Boot can (on supported systems) now seamlessly execute an EFI application like grub2. This allows for an easy bootstrapping process. So far, we have converted the following boards: - Beaglebone black - Beagleboard xm - Pandaboard Give them a try now while they're fresh. More will come and you are more than welcome to try and convert them yourself as well. To do so, just set #define USE_EFI 1 in the image template. If the board doesn't boot after that change, make sure it is converted to distro boot in U-Boot. The systems I'm holding back on converting right now are graphically enabled ones (like the RPi), because I'd like to enable the EFI gfx interface first, so that users get a good grub2 experience. With that, happy hacking and I'm hoping for lots of glorious conversions from the community :). Alex -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-arm+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-arm+owner@opensuse.org
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Alexander Graf