[clug] Raspberry Pi WLAN issues

[Chris Smart]

On 28/05/14 13:13, Jeff Stiff wrote:
> Thanks Chris.
> Hadn't looked that closely at the boot chain yet to discover that. Had just
> been looking at the OS which seemed/s fairly standard.
> 
> One question, why does the boot loader then make the machine useless for
> your use case, what were you wanting to use it for?

I wanted to build my own custom system on it. You can't run regular
distros on it or roll your own (although Arch does have an image which
includes the signed bootloaders) - you can only use hardkernel's OS images.

Hardkernel did say that they would sign your bootloader though, if you
submit it to them and give them a few days.

However I was looking for a completely open boot process to build some
custom cool stuff, so to that end it was no good for me. Maybe with more
pressure on Samsung that will change.

However, if you're happy to run the hardkernel images it's fine - the
android works quote well (although I'd like to build that myself). If
you want a regular distro, Arch seems the best, but be prepared to deal
with GPU driver issues regardless.

Some info on boot sequence here:
http://dev.odroid.com/projects/4412boot

Quoting, "Upon power on the board/tablet will search for the boot media.
It will perform the following:

    1) iROM (Code inside the SoC) will attempt to read the boot media at
the first 512 bytes of it. On those first 512 bytes fwbl1 should exist.
    2) fwbl1 will load bl2 (SPL) that is part of the U-Boot.
    3) bl2 will load U-boot
    4) U-Boot will do whats left, such as handle TrustZone, load kernel
image and Ramdisk if setted."

-c