Tow-Boot
linux
Tow-Boot | linux | |
---|---|---|
24 | 981 | |
481 | 170,551 | |
3.5% | - | |
8.3 | 10.0 | |
12 days ago | 2 days ago | |
Nix | C | |
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
linux
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The File Filesystem
FFS predates FreeBSD and is in some capacity supported by all 3 major BSDs. I'm fairly confident that Linux actually supports it through the ufs driver ( https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/fs/ufs ); whether the use of different names in different places makes it better or worse is an exercise for the reader.
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Linus Torvalds adds arbitrary tabs to kernel code
These are a bit easier to see what's going on:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e...
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e61...
Unfortunately Github doesn't have a way to render symbols for whitespace, but you can tell by selecting the spaces that the previous version had leading tabs. Linus changed it so that the tokens `default` and the number e.g. `12` are also separated by a tab. This is tricky, because the token "default" is seven characters, it will always give this added tab a width of 1 char which makes it always layout the same as if it were a space no matter if you use tab widths of 1, 2, 4, or 8.
- Show HN: Running TempleOS in user space without virtualization
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PfSense Software Embraces Change: A Strategic Migration to the Linux Kernel
There was also a Gentoo effort to run atop FreeBSD[0]. The challenge of course is that afaik none of the BSD kernel ABIs are considered stable. The stable interface is the BSD libc. That said, with binfmt_misc, I don't see a reason you couldn't just run (at least some) FreeBSD binaries on Linux with a thin syscall translation layer (rather something like qemu-system) and then your layer hooked via binfmt_misc. I'm not aware of anyone who has done this for FreeBSD, but prior efforts existed as alternate binfmts for SysVr4/5 ELF binaries[2]. Either way would take some elbow grease, but you *might* even be able just reuse binfmt_elf and just have a new interpreter for FreeBSD elf.
[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_FreeBSD
[1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.html
[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/binfmt_elf....
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Improvements to static analysis in GCC 14
> The original less-than check was deemed incorrect
It was only deemed incorrect because of an information leak. Not because it's a valid use-case for user space to copy smaller portions of *hwrpb into user space. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/21c5977a836e399fc71...
- Linus Torvalds accepts a merge commit to the Linux kernel
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TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
Correct. And the combined work needs to carry the MIT license text and copyright attributions for the MIT software authors. With binary distribution it must also be overt, not hidden in some source code drop, but directly accompanying the binary.
Many people who talk about relicensing never credit the MIT developers or distribute the MIT license text. "Because it's GPL now."
I don't think that you believe that, but many developers do.
Some don't see the need for source code scans for Open Source compliance, because the license.txt says GPL, so it's GPL. Prime example is the Linux kernel. There is code under different licenses in there, but people don't even read https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/COPYING till the end ("In addition, other licenses may also apply.") and conclude it's simply GPL 2 and nothing else.
Also be aware that sublicensing is not the same as relicensing.
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Linus Torvalds is looking for a more modern GUI editor
> Does he have something against it?
He notoriously hates GNU Emacs, yes.
https://marc.info/?m=122955159617722
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...
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The Linux Kernel Prepares for Rust 1.77 Upgrade
So If we would only count code and not comments, it is only 9489 LoC Rust. Which would be about 0.03% and if we take all lines and not only LoC it would be around 0.05%
[0] https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei
[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b401b621758e46812da...
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Proposed Windows NT sync driver brings big Wine/Proton performance improvements
AIUI fsync is built on futex_waitv which has been upstreamed. So this has to be more than that.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/a0eb2da92b715d0c97b...
What are some alternatives?
Jumpdrive - Flash/Rescue SD Card image for PinePhone and PineTab. This is NOT a bootloader
zen-kernel - Zen Patched Kernel Sources
sse2neon - A translator from Intel SSE intrinsics to Arm/Aarch64 NEON implementation
DS4Windows - Like those other ds4tools, but sexier
electron-discord-webapp - A Discord and SpaceBar :electron:-based client implemented without Discord API.
winapps - Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.
uefi-simple - UEFI development made easy
Open and cheap DIY IP-KVM based on Raspberry Pi - Open and inexpensive DIY IP-KVM based on Raspberry Pi
edk2 - EDK II
serenity - The Serenity Operating System 🐞
plasma-mobile - Manjaro Plasma-Mobile
DsHidMini - Virtual HID Mini-user-mode-driver for Sony DualShock 3 Controllers