Hello,
On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 2:51 AM Be <be0(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
I agree that having a firmware in the SPI flash that makes devices
comply with the SystemReady IR spec is the way to go. This is also
aligned with the Fedora IoT folks vision in general since it is better
to have standard images than device specific ones.
Whether Tow Boot or uboot is on the SPI flash isn't really
relevant to distros. The point is that distros shouldn't have to worry about shipping
uboot, just like Fedora doesn't ship UEFI firmware for x86-64. Tow Boot has some UX
advantages for mobile
devices that may or may not be wanted in upstream uboot.
Please read
Samuel's blog post if you haven't already:
https://samuel.dionne-riel.com/blog/2021/05/10/unveiling-tow-boot.html
While Tow Boot seems to be a cool project, it is a Nix u-boot package
with tons of downstream patches. The author mentions that does this to
experiment and that the goal is to eventually propose all those
patches to u-boot for upstreaming.
My opinion is that Fedora should target upstream u-boot instead of
what is in practice a downstream u-boot fork. As you say, what u-boot
flavour is used isn't really that relevant as long as it follows the
u-boot distro commands and is able to find an EFI binary that can be
booted using u-boot's EFI support.
So if the Pine64 folks chose to ship Tow Boot and that allows Fedora
users to write a generic image on the uSD card and boot, that's great
but we should probably document how to flash a u-boot image from the
Fedora u-boot package in the SPI flash. At least if they expect Fedora
developers to help with bugs reported for the firmware and firmware -
bootloader interaction.
> Regarding imagefactory and oz, it looks like those are for cloud images? I'm
confused what that has to do with mobile phones. I'm talking about the
Workstation/Plasma/XFCE images on
https://alt.fedoraproject.org/alt/
Are you talking about Image Factory or Image Builder ? My
understanding is that the future is the latter, which uses underneath
osbuild (which btw you can use to build aarch64 images as well):
https://www.osbuild.org/
As for encryption, we could encrypt the filesystem in a loopback
image or with Tow Boot's USB Mass Storage mode if Plymouth could show an on screen
keyboard to decrypt it.
I see that there's an issue filed for this already
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/plymouth/plymouth/-/issues/144
Best regards,
Javier