[Arm-netbook] Disecting mmcblk0p1 and the boot process

[Frans Pop]

On Wednesday 03 March 2010, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>  what would be i think absolutely fantastic would be something like
> what i described in that cross-post on debian-boot, debian,
> debian-live etc. which is this: a .tgz of a root filesystem which
> contains _another_ tarball of a root filesystem (containing d-i),
> which is unpacked into a ramdisk and then pivot_root'ed.

That's rather limited. I won't really be happy until we can run D-I 
properly under a Debian kernel...

> the other challenge is that it would need to be an fbdev-based d-i (gtk?)
> because of the lack of tty consoles.

That should not be that much of a challenge. The standard newt frontend 
uses vesafb on x86.
We do also have the directfb based installer, though that's currently 
broken. But people are close to completing an X.Org based graphical 
installer that uses the framebuffer video driver.

> but - honestly, i think it's sensible to wait for a bit, see what
> happens about asking for the linux kernel source code.

If I can figure out whether it's safe to try the firmware load bit with the 
default u-boot, but with a custom kernel, I may just go ahead and try 
compiling a custom kernel. As I already mentioned, AFAICT the device 
should already be supported in current upstream kernel source.


BTW, I just noticed that the device does have /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/.
So it would seem that framebuffer console is compiled in.