Tow-Boot VS RPi4

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.

TL:DR: Install Tow-boot first, then install in Mobian image.

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).

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.

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.

U-boot is quite the nice project. Any opinion on tow-boot as a tool for it?

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.

Correct. It does not as shipped. However, the use of this project will bring the firmware into system ready spec, so it can boot with a standard aarch64 UEFI image: https://github.com/pftf/RPi4

are you using the uefi firmware from https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 or are you trying to boot through the gpio serial header?I don't think the pi can boot on its own through uboot unless your using a serial/usb connection

Looks like you can use Grub on UEFI ARM systems, but Raspberry Pi isn't natively running UEFI. https://github.com/pftf/RPi4

The rpi4 has uefi firmware available, this allows you to boot any generic uefi aarch64 image, you no longer need rpi specific images.

https://github.com/pftf/RPi4

Straight out of the box, the image wouldn't boot, said that start.elf was invalid, so I went to https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases as suggested in the Readme.md file in the EFI partition. I installed that (version 1.34) over the existing EFI partition and tried again. That booted up the kernel, but it apparently died when it enabled the interrupt controller. The last messages are about armgic0.

Maybe similar discussion on github:

You can use these firmware images for UEFI as well as install with the arm ISO. I didn't have graphics acceleration that way, but it might be an easy fix.

I'm guessing these are not SystemReady certified with UEFI firmware and require "bespoke" preinstalled arm images?

https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/system...

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102677/0100/UEFI-req...

I have three SystemReady arm devices and it's pretty awesome to be able to just boot an aarch64 live ISO and install. The experience is the same for running vms via ESXi arm edition.

Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier - https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/downloads#?search=uefi

Honeycomb LX2 - https://github.com/SolidRun/lx2160a_uefi

RPI4 - https://github.com/pftf/RPi4

It can be tedious building/provisioning the firmware but once complete they are ready for any aarch64 uefi iso.

What is annoying however is when distros don't ship an aarch64 uefi iso - but instead choose to build a zillion device specific "preinstalled" arm images. (looking at you manjaro)

The list of supported devices for ESXi arm edition is a great place to start for identifying options and is constantly updated.

https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition

  Raspberry-Pi-4

The only reason why I am was trying to build the image was because I wanted to move stuff as mainline as possible and was worried that any installation made with the help of RPi4 UEFI firmware would stop booting after a while.

Most ARM hardware is cellphones, raspberry pi and the Mac M1, which certainly aren't that type.

But a lot of ARM hardware is that type. The keywords are SBSA / SBBR / SystemReady. If your hardware is SBBR compatible then Fedora and Ubuntu's ARM64 iso, and Windows ARM64, downloaded from their website, will at least boot fine (drivers are a different question as always).

There's a good list of supported hardware in the lower half of https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture... . Many systems from Avantek, Gigabyte, NXP, Marvell, Solidrun etc are standardizing on this way of booting.

DeviceTree is low-level enough that you can implement UEFI on top of it. There's a UEFI port for the Raspberry Pi 4 at https://rpi4-uefi.dev/ that produces an SBBR layer, allowing it to boot any off-the-shelf ARM64 SBBR distro.