Dual Booting?


PhonicUK

Member
Joined
Mar 27, 2009
Messages
148
Age
36
Website
www.phonicuk.com
I'm wondering what provisions there will be for Dual Booting on the Pandora. While Angstrom will probably be my primary OS of choice, if we get Windows CE or (the recently mentioned) AROS, I may well wish to multiboot. Or even between different distros (Angstrom/Gentoo on the same device)

Is there an ARM bootloader that can do this?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I think they said the internal bootloader will only support single-boot, so the easiest thing would be to just boot from a separate SD card.

If you want to have multiple operating systems on one SD card... who knows.
 
I don't think multi-booting from NAND will be encouraged, but you can boot from SD cards, so you could have one for each OS.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
lulzfish said:
I think they said the internal bootloader will only support single-boot, so the easiest thing would be to just boot from a separate SD card.

If you want to have multiple operating systems on one SD card... who knows.


I think that UBoot can boot from either any SD card (But only from one partition per SD card), the internal NAND or do things like memory testing?
But I'm probably wrong since I haven't yet found a good-enough source of information about it (albeit that I haven't looked for one that extensively).
 
Last edited by a moderator:
This will probably be possible in the future, I doubt its possible already. But as the others said, you can still boot from another SD.
Things can change a lot in 2 month anyway so why do you care?
 
You can find information on the bootloader being used for the Pandora (and Beagleboard) here: http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot

It doesn't have multiboot support, per se... but as already discussed you can have multiple operating systems on either separate SD cards or different partitions. Unfortunately if you go the multiple partition route you likely will need to edit the boot script or reflash the bootloader on NAND with different boot args.

Of note though, you can also set up bootp/tmpfs/nfs loading so you can keep your OSes on a server and just load it over the network if you wanted to do development.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Surely you could have the bootloader boot a boot manger like plop or something?
 
Titcher said:
Surely you could have the bootloader boot a boot manger like plop or something?

*resisting the urge to use a worn-out meme*
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Since the NAND is best left untouched, it'll probably be best to keep alternate OS-es on an SD card anyway.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top