On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 05:49:14AM -0000, Be wrote: > Hello, > I've been using Fedora on my Pinephone for like 9 months or so and my Pinephone Pro Explorer Edition just arrived the other day. The original Pinephone's boot order had the microSD card before the eMMC which made it really easy to try different OSes. By contrast, on the Pinephone Pro, the boot order in hardware is: > > 1. SPI flash > 2. eMMC > 3. microSD > > From the factory, there is a u-boot image on the eMMC drive which will boot an OS from the SD card before the eMMC and there is nothing on the SPI flash. This is problematic because it's really easy to accidentally get the device into an unbootable state when installing an OS to the eMMC drive if the factory uboot build is erased. There is a way to temporarily disable the eMMC drive in hardware to make it boot from SD, but that's not obvious or convenient. So, currently, the Pine wiki (https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro) advises against replacing the stock Manjaro OS on the eMMC drive and few distros are providing prebuilt images. > > People working on different distros have been coordinating how to deal with this. The plan is to use a fairly new project, Tow Boot, and flash it to the SPI flash: https://samuel.dionne-riel.com/blog/2021/05/10/unveiling-tow-boot.html Putting the platform firmware on the SPI flash chip separate from the eMMC drive will make the process of installing OSes easier and more foolproof. Support for the Pinephone Pro in Tow Boot is almost ready with support for the Pinephone Pro's SPI flash just added today, albeit it needs a little polishing. Tow Boot on the SPI flash will make the process of installing an OS similar to x86; distros just need to create a UEFI bootable system and do not need to worry about shipping platform firmware. Tow Boot also obviates the need for JumpDrive. Simply pressing the volume up button on boot will expose the eMMC drive as a USB mass storage device, refer to https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/pull/67 for details about the UX design. Hopefully future Pinephon > e Pro batches will ship with Tow Boot on the SPI flash from the factory, but for now users will need to install it by booting a Linux system from an SD card. A Tow Boot installer image like that has already been made for the Pinebook Pro, so I think one for the Pinephone Pro will be ready to test soon. So, sadly, I still don't quite understand the boot process on arm devices, but why is tow-boot suggested here instead of just using uboot? ie, whats the advantage of tow-boot here? > This is great new for Fedora because I think it means we can use the normal Fedora tools for building ARM images to create UEFI bootable images without needing the scripts in https://github.com/nikhiljha/pp-fedora-sdsetup that were made for the Pinephone. Using Fedora tooling to build the Pinephone Pro images opens up the path to smartphone support in upstream Fedora. I've been digging around in scattered documentation and talking to Conan Kudo on Matrix and IIUC, the way the upstream images are built is that Punji calls `koji image-build` which calls livemedia-creator. Please correct me if I've misunderstood this. I've tried to figure out how to build aarch64 images locally on my x86-64 laptop and made a bit of progress using Mock with livemedia-creator as documented at https://weldr.io/lorax/livemedia-creator.html#using-mock-and-no-virt-to-create-images arm images are made via imagefactory/oz, depending on what image you are talking about here? There is also work to move imagefactory/oz built images over to ImageBuilder (a image as a service type thing run by Red Hat). > Thanks to the efforts getting Fedora on the original Pinephone, good progress has been made getting Plasma Mobile and Phosh packaged in upstream Fedora. There are still a handful of packages in the https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/njha/mobile/ COPR repository that aren't upstream. I think enough has been upstreamed at this point that we can start working on base Plasma Mobile and Phosh Kickstart files to use with livemedia-creator that could eventually make it upstream. For now, we'll still need device-specific Kickstarts for the downstream kernel packages which could %include the base Plasma Mobile or Phosh Kickstart. Fortunately for the Pinephone Pro, distros are coordinating to avoid the fragmentation that has happened with kernels for the original Pinephone and development effort is being coordinated on the https://gitlab.com/pine64-org/linux/-/tree/pine64-kernel-ppp-5.16.y/ repository. Right. I would think next think we want is to upstream uboot support, then get kernel support in. I have no idea if Fedora kernel maintainers would be willing to carry some/any/all of the patches there, but I think that has a much better chance than the pinephone kernel patches had. ;) Packages are good to get going, but without kernel support we will be doing them as part of a remix like we are now. ;( > > One important feature that we haven't gotten working on the Pinephone is full disk encryption. One issue blocking this is that Plymouth (the software in the initrd that asks for the LUKS password) does not have an on screen keyboard: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/plymouth/plymouth/-/issues/144 Also, the Anaconda GUI wasn't designed for small touchscreen devices without a keyboard. Fortunately this could change with the recently announced rewrite of the Anaconda GUI: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/anaconda-is-getting-a-new-suit/35916/15 Yeah, this is kind of hard as we don't typically do full normal installs on arm devices. We do need some way to do the disk encryption however. > Does this seem like a reasonable plan? Is there anything I've overlooked? I think it sounds fine to me (except I don't get the towboot advantage), but I think it's going to be a lot of work, so don't expect something tomorrow. ;) kevin
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