It is possible to install GNU Boot on I945 Thinkpads without opening
the computer even if the nonfree bios sets the bootblock region (the
last 64K of the flash chip) read-only.
The flash chip looks like that:
+----- -----+---------------------------+-------------------------+
| ... | Secondary bootblock (64k) | Primary bootblock (64k) |
+----- -----+---------------------------+-------------------------+
0 0x1e0000 2MiB
To bypass the read-only restriction we use an utility (bucts) that
tells the hardware to swap the primary bootblock with the secondary
one for the next boot. We then have to disable that swap and reflash
again.
CONFIG_INTEL_ADD_TOP_SWAP_BOOTBLOCK generates the two bootblocks
directly in coreboot so we don't need to use special commands to do
that anymore.
In addition the MacBook 1.1 and 2.1 are known not to have such
read-only restrictions so they don't need to have
CONFIG_INTEL_ADD_TOP_SWAP_BOOTBLOCK enabled.
Signed-off-by: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>
Acked-by: Adrien 'neox' Bourmault <neox@gnu.org>
The various scripts present in GNU Boot are very fragile, so it's a
good idea to have a pristine GNU Boot source code for making releases.
The issue is that 'git clean -dfx' doesn't remove existing git
repositories like coreboot/ grub/ etc, so we need additional code to
take care of that.
Signed-off-by: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>
Acked-by: Adrien 'neox' Bourmault <neox@gnu.org>
This should contain no functional modifications.
Signed-off-by: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>
Acked-by: Adrien 'neox' Bourmault <neox@gnu.org>
neox: wrote the commit message
Having an {arch,debian,fedora35,ubuntu2004,void} GNU Boot package
looked strange. Having a dependencies package instead makes more
sense.
Signed-off-by: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>
Acked-by: Adrien 'neox' Bourmault <neox@gnu.org>
The various build scripts are scattered around in multiple
places. This make it hard for contributors to understand what they
need to modify.
Most GNU Boot users are interested in running GNU/Linux or BSD
operating systems. And the way to install software on these
operating systems is through a package manager. So most users and
contributors already know the package manager abstraction.
So using that abstraction makes it easier to find where things are.
The scripts to install dependencies don't really fit the new structure
but for now we move them in to make sure that everything works
fine. This could be fixed later on and migrated to a single
dependencies packages by auto-detecting the distribution with
/etc/os-release.
Signed-off-by: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>
Acked-by: Adrien 'neox' Bourmault <neox@gnu.org>
Signed-off-by: Adrien 'neox' Bourmault <neox@gnu.org>
Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli
