galliumos-distro
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GalliumOS
GalliumOS: New port: arm on ASUS C201 (veyron speedy)
Just a thought and an offer of a tester. I have recently done some work with u-boot, which is currently making its way through the upstreaming process, that allows booting linux in a fairly painless manner. One can in theory boot grub2 in efi mode on the device from u-boot which should make booting and installation doable in a generic manner for any distro.
I have one ASUS C201 4GB version which will not be in daily use which I can offer up as a test bed, and am generally skilled and knowledgeable in the arm boot process, so I can help cook up a live media which can be used to boot and install.
@hanetzer That's great. I'd love it if we could offer an ARM build of GalliumOS!
I have no experience with the platform though (much less any Chromebook quirks), so it has always seemed beyond reach. I know how we put together the Intel images of course, but that seems like the easy part. :)
What can we do to coordinate efforts?
Well, ideally I'll be able to get grubefi to work on u-boot, and at that point we'd need an installer initramfs and kernel packages (this is debian based, right?), probably based on multi_v7_defconfig, which we could boot from usb (as there is no ethernet and ymodem'ing files of a few megs or more in size is quite slow and annoying).
GalliumOS is based on Ubuntu, so Debian by proxy. I'd guess that the initramfs and kernel bits could be borrowed from Ubuntu/Debian (or even ChromeOS?) initially, to limit the scope of testing to the bootloader and image layout. Is that likely to be true?
Yeah, that's it, ubuntu. I need to get usb and sdcard to work in u-boot (it may be the presense of my servo debug board that's making them go stupid; most users will never need to make use of one, its a development tool which can proxy some of that stuff outside of the chromebook itself to make some stuff easier). What kernel version are ya'll working against?
We have 4.14.x and 4.15.x builds in various states of testing, and a more stable 4.8.17 build as the baseline. I expect to start porting patches to 4.16.x in the next few days though, we're gearing up for a new release based on upstream Ubuntu 18.04.
Ah, that's cool. we could probably use the ubuntu netboot initrd.gz as a starting point, learn about their tooling and such to create one suitable for your distro on this (and other arm) system(s). Mali makes it tricky due to binary distribution limitations, but yuq has a few repos which are very interesting in this space we could probably make use of.
