Re: PINE64 Pinebook Pro...GNU Boot port

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Sun, 13 Oct 2024 16:06:46 -0700
Marc Dunivan <m7173588@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is anyone working on--or considering-- porting GNU Boot to ARM64?
That was not announced yet but it was part of the longer term plan of
GNU Boot.

Right now we're more focused on trying to have the basics for the
project to enable people to more easily contribute (almost done) and to
enable people to use GNU Boot more easily (work in progress).

Given the legacy of the project, we focused on x86 first, but we
also welcome patches to add support for ARM as well.

If no one does that we might do it but way way later on as there is
still a lot to do for x86.

> Could GNU Boot project make use of a Pinebook Pro laptop?  Or does
> anyone want to? ( attempt to boot to UBoot as the payload?)
There is a much easier route here: we integrated Guix inside GNU Boot
already, so the way to add support for ARM would be to simply use Guix
to build u-boot inside GNU Boot.

Upstream Guix should also support the same bootloader target (like
u-boot-pinebook-pro-rk3399) to minimize the amount of maintenance we
have to make in the long run.

Guix also has u-boot-qemu-arm64 so that can even be used during some
automatic testing if needed.

But then this also raises the question of the advantages of GNU Boot
over plain Guix. They are that:
- The binaries that are published can be downloaded without Guix.
- GNU Boot already has a page on the website where people can report if
  a given (set of) image(s) work or not. We'll probably continue
  improving that over time. With u-boot that should be easier as it's
  possible to generate a single binary for each computer. 
- For x86 we already have an automatic test with Trisquel and that's
  not something easy to do within Guix. So we could do that for ARM too
  if that's needed for instance.

Also a thing is that u-boot default configurations often miss some
consistency (it's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just due to
different goals), and like with Tow-Boot, GNU Boot is also wants to be
consistent as that can simplify a lot the documentation.

So in the case of GNU Boot which interfaces to use might need to be
considered in the long run.

But right now if you or someone else wants to add support for ARM, I
would expect the people that do the work to make sure that there is at
least one standard way of booting an FSF certified distribution like
PureOS, Trisquel, Guix, etc with the given u-boot image for easier
testing (else that would force users/contributors/maintainers to test
with nonfree distros).

Parabola uses syslinux config files (on 32bit ARM) and Guix works well
with UEFI on arm64 (it can build images with GRUB for arm64), so
finding something that work should not be very hard and we can also do
some testing on our side if needed.

Denis.

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