OS Support and Booting

MNT Reform
#1

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?

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#2

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.

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#3

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

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#4

Some more details on system boot are here: Advanced Topics — MNT Reform Operator Handbook documentation

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.

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#5

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.

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#6

I would love to see NetBSD and other BSDs on the MNT Reform!

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