Installing fedora on an arm chromebook (the old one)

[Rafael Espíndola]

I had in the past followed the instructions in

https://www.berrange.com/posts/2013/03/31/automated-install-of-fedora-18-arm-on-a-samsung-google-chromebook/

But I wanted to try to install fedora 20 and have a a simpler
partition layout. In the process I found out a bit on how the system
works.

I first upgraded chrome os to get a new kernel (3.8.11) and copied the
kernel partition, /lib/modules and /lib/firmware.

I then got a f19 ssd image and booted from that.

The usb boot being enable flag is stored in the internal flash. The
flags listed in vboot_reference/firmware/lib/vboot_nvstorage.c are
storred in the first 16 bytes of the disk. To clear chromeos and keep
the machine booting from USB I did

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0

Create a nvram.txt file with

7000000001000000000000000000003f

The 1 in the middle is the usb boot flag.

$ xxd -r -p nvram.txt nvram
$ dd if=nvram of=/dev/mmcblk0

I then created 2 partitions, one for the kernel and one for the root.
To get the kernel to boot, I checked

firmware/lib/cgptlib/include/cgptlib_internal.h

and noticed that what was needed was:

Correct type: sgdisk -t1:7f00 /dev/mmcblk0
Setting attribute bits 48  and 56: sgdisk -A1:set:48 /dev/mmcblk0;
sgdisk -A1:set:56 /dev/mmcblk0

Repack the kernel with vbutil_kernel and point it to the new root
partition. I then got the fedora20 root image, extracted the files for
/ and replaced /lib/modules and /lib/firmware.

I tried to get X running with both the armsoc and fbdev drivers, but
so far no success, which is fine for me since I use the machine as an
arm devboard.

Cheers,
Rafael