Tow-Boot
RPi3
Tow-Boot | RPi3 | |
---|---|---|
24 | 7 | |
481 | 262 | |
3.5% | 1.9% | |
8.3 | 4.1 | |
12 days ago | 11 months ago | |
Nix | Shell | |
MIT License | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Tow-Boot
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Building an ARM64 home server the hard way
For the Pine family of SBCs I highly recommend installing Tow-Boot - https://tow-boot.org/ - on the SPI flash memory to allow yourself much better boot options, including booting directly from NVMe so you don't need to keep the MicroSD card plugged-in.
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I fucked up with my Pinephone Pro (postmarket edition), do not boot anymore
TL:DR: Install Tow-boot first, then install in Mobian image.
- Can't get PinePhone to boot
- Another one of those "which distro runs better these days"
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Not booting on Micro SD
I opened a ticket on Two-Boot because I wasn't sure Tow-Boot was actually installed, and every information on the internet assume you don't use Tow-Boot (and so, Micro SD is booted if present).
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Back to Android (for the time being) - Sadly my PinePhone experiment has - after several months of running one as a daily driver - come to an end for now and I'm back on my Pixel 2.
Also the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro both can (and the PPP already does in postmarketOS) boot with UEFI nowadays. For that we use Tow-Boot currently but it could be any platform firmware really.
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Unable to compile ATF to build Uboot
Also you should use Tow-boot which is more user-friendly than u-boot. you can download it here. Make sure you select the one for "pine64-pinephonePro" and not "pine64-pinephoneA64". You can find instructions for installing it here.
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How does ARM support for Linux work? Why do they use custom kernels, OS instead of mainline and the typical distros?
U-boot is quite the nice project. Any opinion on tow-boot as a tool for it?
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PINE64 has let its community down
This seems way overblown, from pretty much all perspectives.
1) Listening to community. People can suggest all kinds of conflicting things, and you just can't satisfy everyone. My experience is that many of my HW modification suggestions were listened to, even some I'd expect the Pine64 might have found a bit frivolous, like desire to have some GPIO exposed as easily accessible solderable pads on the Pinephone keyboard's PCB, so that I can mod the keyboard later on and add some buttons to the bottom side of it, etc. I got some help with aquiring of information about various chips, that I requested, etc. I didn't get everything I wanted. Life is hard I guess. OTOH, Pine64 probably did not listen to some other HW mod suggestions that I have participated in group thinking about in the chats.
I think those were the mods that would require more risky redesign, and would cause incompatibilities between Pinephone and the Pro, like sugestion to split DC-IN and USB-IN on the Original Pinephone PMIC to better support the keyboard, or suggestions to redesign battery charging circuitry in Pinebook Pro, so that drivers can limit input current to be able to follow the Type-C/PD specs more closly.
These are risky to follow from us randos on the internet. Even simple suggestions are risky to follow, even if they are correct! Take the addition of diode to prevent some issues with the pinephone keyboard's charging circuitry. The suggestion was followed, but mistakes were made in the long chain that engineering the change takes, and the diode was placed incorrectly and prevented charging the keyboard completely.
2) Bootloader/SPI thing. Yeah it's unpleasant for distros to have to include U-Boot as part of the distro image, especially when things are in flux and fixing bootloader is required for fixing things in general, too, and you have to track non-mainline patches, because Pro support can't be mainlined, yet.
So now there's Tow-Boot to come to the rescue as bit of a center of gravity for U-Boot development/support. Except that it's not really that maintained either with last patches added like 6 months ago https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/tree/released/boards/pi... despite persistent issues with Pinephone Pro bootlooping, because bootloader allows boot when there's not enough energy in the battery. Some hack patches are available, but not included. Etc.
Also because things are in flux, allowing users to combine arbitrary U-Boot with arbitrary kernel version can lead to all kind of fun things, like hard to explain overheating of the phone, because kernel enabled cpuidle support, and U-Boot version in SPI lacks it and similar things.
3) Diversity/monoculture angle
Focing Tow-Boot can easily be construed as just another thing that Pine64 is forcing on users by default, too. Pinephone/pinephone pro has bootloader diversity, with alternative bootloaders being much better for users in several aspects (like not having charging or bootloop issues, or having multi-boot functionality or GUI) and maybe worse in others. So on one hand Drew is arguing that there's monoculture in distros, but wants to force monoculture in bootloader, barely maintained or developed one from Pine64 support perspective.
In the end, the most important thing is that there's not technical lockdown (secure boot not enabled). Pine64 has no say in what user can flash or not. Escaping the default bootloader is as easy as booting the preloaded Manjaro and erasing it from SPI and eMMC. The phone or pinebook will then boot whatever user wants to boot from SD card.
- I Left PINE64
RPi3
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Anon is worried about Linux
Projects like Tow-Boot, a distribution of U-Boot, provide a nice boot menu and allow you to boot the "generic ARM" ISOs that are usually just UEFI. On the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4, you can put Tianocore EDK2 onto the SD card and boot any UEFI image, including Windows 10 or 11 for ARM.
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Raspberry Pi 4 running Gentoo?
The approach I used is very different from the conventional setup. Most setups will rely on the default boot loader stack that the Raspberry Pi uses, but this project instead relies on the UEFI images provided by https://github.com/pftf/RPi3/ and https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 instead. There are two reasons for this.
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Raspberry Pi 3 Fastboot – Less Than 2 Seconds
> Isn't a faster boot what everybody wants?
I’ll rather have slow boot and proper UEFI support so I can boot any vanilla ARM64 Linux distro (Debian proper), instead of images/distros which have been crafted to be device-specific (Raspbian).
I boot this thing once every second month at most. I honestly couldn’t care less about boot-times.
Luckily for me, there are solutions to my problem too ;)
https://github.com/pftf/RPi3
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Google will soon block YouTube and Maps apps for Android 2.3 users
It's been manually implemented for many devices - the Renegade Project and Raspberry Pi 3 implementation do exactly this.
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State of netbooting Raspberry Pi in 2021
Odd to see using UEFI to NetBoot not considered an option at all.
It should eliminate the timing-bug and leave you in a more reliable (and scriptable!) pre-boot environment. What more do you need?!?
Both the RPi3 and 4 can be UEFI booted, so this is definitely a real-world option.
Links:
- https://github.com/pftf/RPi3
- https://github.com/pftf/RPi4
- Considering giving OpenBSD another try
- I've recently got OpenBSD up and running on a Pi 3B. I've documented the process, in case it is useful to anyone else.
What are some alternatives?
Jumpdrive - Flash/Rescue SD Card image for PinePhone and PineTab. This is NOT a bootloader
RPi4 - Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI Firmware Images
sse2neon - A translator from Intel SSE intrinsics to Arm/Aarch64 NEON implementation
edk2-sdm845 - (Maybe) Generic edk2 port for sdm845
electron-discord-webapp - A Discord and SpaceBar :electron:-based client implemented without Discord API.
edk2 - EDK II
uefi-simple - UEFI development made easy
Debian-Pi-Aarch64 - This is the first 64-bit system in the world to support all Raspberry Pi 64-bit hardware!!! (Include: PI400,4B,3B+,3B,3A+,Zero2W)
edk2-msm - Broken edk2 port for Qualcomm platforms xD
plasma-mobile - Manjaro Plasma-Mobile
homebridge-raspbian-image - Official Homebridge Raspberry Pi Image based on Raspberry Pi OS Lite.