Dual Booting?

[PhonicUK]

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?

 

[lulzfish]

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.

 

[Pleng]

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.

 

[dflemstr]

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).

 

[JayFoxRox]

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?

 

[viridior]

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.

 

[Titcher]

Surely you could have the bootloader boot a boot manger like plop or something?

 

[bzar]

Surely you could have the bootloader boot a boot manger like plop or something?

*resisting the urge to use a worn-out meme*

 

[lulzfish]

I couldn't resist. There's a demotivator now.

 

[maddis]

i use acronis os selector: www.acronis.com.

Might do the trick plus linux is supported

 

[dflemstr]

i use acronis os selector: www.acronis.com.

Might do the trick plus linux is supported

...but it's x86 only. If someone hasn't ported it, that is.

 

[maddis]

me out of all people should have checked that first before posting. I guess its a good example of what would fit the bill if it were arm compatible

 

[sindbad]

Since the NAND is best left untouched, it'll probably be best to keep alternate OS-es on an SD card anyway.