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2026–07–12: levinboot-revived 1.0.0 release – Fastest Pinebook Pro and Pinephone Pro GUI bootloader

I finally have a new levinboot release ready. It's a pretty big one, so I gave it a version bump to 1.0.0 and a slightly different name: levinboot-revived. :) I guess it's fair to call it that, because original project has been quite dormant for a while, and this release brings it back with a lot of new stuff.

For those who don't know, levinboot is a very fast bare-metal bootloader for RK3399 platforms like RockPro64, Pinebook Pro, and now also Pinephone Pro. My main goal was to make it much more practical to use on the Pine64 devices I care about, by adding a standard boot flow, display support, and an on-screen boot menu.

You can find the code at the usual place: https://xff.cz/git/levinboot/

The new version also comes with pre-built binaries, ready to use. It's best used with rk2aw which will layer a few important features on top of levinboot, or rather before it, like ability to have a backup bootloader, select USB mask ROM recovery mode, and dead battery charging fix for Pinephone Pro.

What's new

The big theme of this release is making levinboot behave like a normal, civilized bootloader, while keeping the speed that makes it interesting.

New levinboot versions probe storage and display boot menu instantly upon pressing a power button, and with fast eMMC storage, levinboot can still achieve 200–400ms boot times even with large kernel or initramfs images.

FAT32 / extlinux.conf boot flow

The old levinboot expected a custom payload partition with a specific GUID and a monolithic compressed blob that contained ATF, kernel, DTB and initramfs all packed together. That was very fast to load, but also very annoying to set up and modify, especially for multi-boot use cases.

Starting with this release, levinboot uses a standard FAT32 boot partition with /extlinux/extlinux.conf, just like U-Boot or p-boot 2.0. It scans GPT partitions with the legacy BIOS bootable attribute set, mounts the first one read-only, and parses the config. Example:

default arch
timeout 30
label arch
    menu label Arch Linux
    linux /Image.gz
    fdt /rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb
    initrd /initramfs.img
    append console=ttyS2,1500000n8 root=PARTUUID=... rw

Compression is now selected per file by extension: .gz, .lz4, or .zst. Uncompressed files work too. The old --payload-initcpio option and the custom payload partition format are gone. SPI payload loading from dramstage is also gone, though SPI flash can still hold levinboot itself.

Pinebook Pro display and graphical boot menu

The Pinebook Pro build now brings up the internal eDP panel and shows a simple graphical boot menu. No more guessing which entry is going to boot, and no serial cable required to pick a different one.

Here's what it looks like in action:

Pinephone Pro support

This is probably the most personally important part for me, since I've been running my own private levinboot port on my Pinephone Pro phones for a long time, although without display support. This release adds that support and pushes the levinboot usability closer to p-boot.

The Pinephone Pro build boosts the USB input current limit early, drives the notification LEDs, and uses the volume keys and power key to control a graphical menu on the phone.

Pinephone Pro booting from eMMC:

USB boot for Pinephone Pro

For development, USB mask ROM loading is still the fastest way to iterate. The release supports a new, convenient self-contained --boot mode in usbtool that computes the payload layout for you dynamically, and passes it to the dramstage bootloader. All you need to do is to select mask ROM USB mode in rk2aw and then run usbtool with simple --kernel, --dtb, --tfa, --initramfs, and --cmdline parameters. No magic numbers to remember, and no need to keep sramstage/dramstage blobs around, because those are embedded to usbtool during build. Great for testing kernel changes when debugging Linux kernel issues.

Here's a Pinephone Pro booting levinboot over USB:

Cleaner build and quieter boot

A few things that should make the project easier to build and use:

I also removed some legacy levinboot behaviors that were getting in the way:

Better DRAM payload layout

levinboot now relocates dramstage to 1 MiB from the start of DRAM and loads the kernel Image at 2 MiB, correctly aligned. The DTB and initrd are packed above the kernel's full runtime footprint on 2 MiB boundaries. This removes the old silent 60-something MiB kernel size limit and fixes the „misaligned image“ warning Linux used to print. Initramfs limit also radically increased, because all scratchpad areas in DRAM are located at the end of DRAM, so there's nothing in the way of real boot payloads from 2 MiB offset onwards almost towards the end of DRAM anymore.

License change

Because the FAT32, vconsole, extlinux and other code is ported from p-boot 2.0 which is GPL-3.0 licensed project, and also due to massive amount of other changes, I decided to re-license levinboot under GPL-3.0+. Original author made this possible by the choice of releasing levinboot to public domain None of the above would be possible without Jona Stubbe's (CrystalGamma) original work on levinboot, and this will ensure the new project stays open.

Devices and status

NVMe boot is still configurable at build time but I did not have a way to test it. Pinephone Pro doesn't have NVMe, so this only matters for RockPro64/Pinebook Pro users who want to boot the kernel from NVMe after levinboot itself loads from SD/eMMC/SPI. My only NVMe I had freely available for random testing is bricked, and at todays prices, sorry, you'll have to test it yourself if you care about this boot path. RockPro64 status is also somewhat untested for this release. I tested it early before adding display support, and I'm not sure it still works. It's not a primary target board for me, so I did not want to delay release for it. Pinebook Pro build is tested on the older Pinebook Pro variant I have access to, and I'm unaware of anything that would prevent the build from working on newer variants. I just wanted to lay out where the testing stands.

I've been using the Pinebook Pro and Pinephone Pro builds as my daily bootloader for a while now and they're working well for me. If you try it out, let me know how it goes.

Happy fast booting. :)

The code can be found at https://xff.cz/git/levinboot/

For installation instructions and pre-built binaries, go to: https://xff.cz/git/levinboot/tree/dist (or git clone from https://xff.cz/git/levinboot/ and go to dist/ directory)

And I'll be back soon with major updates about p-boot 2.0, release of which I've been preparing early this year and is almost ready. :-)