p-boot - PinePhone bootloader

p-boot is one of the smallest and fastest GUI featuring smartphone bootloaders ever written. One can never know for sure, because there are no official competitions in this niche space that I know of, but given the low-powered nature of PinePhone, p-boot is bound to impress in any case.

In 32 KiB binary p-boot will give you:

• Volume and power button controllable boot menu in ~250ms since pressing a power key
• Multiple boot options with separate splashscreen for each choice
• Automatic poweroff if no choice is made
• Selectable default boot menu choice (with a long press of power key)
• Fast menu-skiping alternative boot option choice (by holding a volume key during boot)
• Fastest load times for kernel images at 85 MiB/s (from eMMC)
• Flickerless passover of display pipeline state to Linux kernel
• An assortment of unique PinePhone specific features, compared to U-Boot
• Sub-second boot times to /bin/init
  • 50-70ms bootloader itself
  • ~150ms load times for kernel image (eMMC, for SD card it's ~600ms)
  • ~450ms kernel boot time to executing /bin/init

See the README file for detailed description of all features.

Showcase of p-boot in a video:

The major downside to p-boot is that you can't pronounce its name aloud without a chuckle. ;-)

News

Keep yourself in the loop about new releases and features via RSS. The latest news:

2020-10-31

p-boot released with 60 FPS LCD fix, reboot to eMMC, battery indicator, and HW framebuffer scaling support

2020-08-31

p-boot released with major cleanups, GUI boot menu support, and support for 3GiB PinePhone Convergence Package edition

Screenshot of the latest p-boot version:

Support the project

p-boot is free and opensource software released under GPLv3. It is an independent personal project not backed by any comapny or commercial interests. You can contribute by writing code, helping improve documentation, spreading the word, and/or by donating.

Share on: Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Documentation

At the moment, all documentation is in the form of a README file in the p-boot's git repository.

Download

There are no versioned releases, yet. Pre-built binaries of p-boot and ATF/Crust firmware are available in p-boot git repository in the dist/ directory. You don't need to build anything, unless you really want to.

Installation

Installation consists of creating a configuration file with boot menu options, writing p-boot binary to eMMC or SD card, and creating a specially crafted boot partition (MBR partition format) using a special tool provided along with p-boot.

Details are available in the README file in the p-boot's git repository. If you have any trouble installing or using p-boot, let me know. It only means that documentation can be improved. :-)

Bugs and support

Please report bugs via email:

• p-boot@xnux.eu

Development

Project status: p-boot is maintained and actively developed by the original author.

You can join development of p-boot by sending questions, ideas, bugreports and patches to the above mailing address.

GIT repository is available at: https://megous.com/git/p-boot.