megi's PinePhone Development Log RSS

+972

2020–08–31: Releasing p-boot GUI bootloader

Today I finally decided to release display support for p-boot. Along with it, p-boot's code also got quite a bit of cleanup. At this point main.c is fairly readable. There's also a new support for 3GiB variant of PinePhone, that TL Lim sent me some time ago.

I've copied my megatools.megous.com website template, and made it work better on mobile phones, to make a nice landing page for it, too: xnux.eu/p-boot

Since previous publicly released version, p-boot can now be configured to show the name of the phone on the boot screen, which is quite useful if you're like me and TL Lim keeps sending you PinePhones for development every other full moon. :)

I also use the name to describe HW mods I did to the particular phone.

There are some things I'd still like the p-boot to do. Since p-boot has direct access to PMIC, I thought of using it for following things:

And more:

In the other news, TODO

I tried to cleanup and organize my kernel upstreaming TODO list, and it's still too long. So instead I decided to give p-boot a little boost in exposure by preparing a multi-boot image that will feature a range of diverse distributions. With help of #pinephone channel users, I came up with this list:

Looks like making some of these share space and play nice with the others will be quite a challenge. If you're a distro maintainer, publishing a ready-made rootfs tarball is a great way to simplify your inclusion into a multi-boot image.

The image will be great for people new to PinePhone to try various distros with very little hassle. Just flash one image to SD card, and select the distro on boot.

I'll try documenting the image creation steps, but it will most probably be a one shot experiment for me. So if anyone will want to maintain this image further into the future, they'll be very wellcome.

I'm still undecided whether I'll force my kernel on all the above distros, or let them use their own. Probably the latter.