For the initial i.MX8MQ, I’m looking for some details as to booting and OS support.
The Crowd Supply page mentions that it will come with a version of Debian.
Looking at your source code, you have the system operating via u-boot, and you have created DTS files for supporting the DTBs to allow u-boot to understand the hardware layout: https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform-system-image
There are patches for several projects to optimize them for the Reform, are there plans for these patches to go upstream so they can later downstream into distros?
If there isn’t Voidlinux support already then I’ll do an unofficial port of it asap as I wanna use the Reform as my daily driver which means I’ll use my beloved distribution with it.
You should be able to use any distro if you use the supplied kernel and DTS (Image and .dtb files in the root (/) directory of the SD card). Plus, copy /sbin/reform-init to the new system as well. You might want the other stuff from reform-tools as well: reform2-imx8mq/reform-tools_1.0-6 · main · Reform / reform-system-image · GitLab
The reform-init script mentioned at the end lets you dynamically change the rootfs after the kernel is up, based on the text file /reform-boot-medium. It is something that is traditionally done in initramfs, but MNT Reform does not use an initramfs by default. After re-mounting the filesystem root (also supports LUKS), reform-init passes control to the real init of your distro.
I’ll be having a play around with NetBSD/evbarm, having messed with it on a HummingBoard Pulse (an i.MX8MQ SoC) a while ago. Although I expect that will be with llvmpipe, given I don’t think there’s been much etnaviv action in the tree for a while.
Sorry to dig up an old thread but did you ever get anywhere with NetBSD? I’m hoping to get my own Reform soon and planned to test it with NetBSD as soon as it came. Any tips or roadblocks you can share?