Pyra Question

[TrashyMG]

Is it still covered by warranty? Hope you didn't fry it or anything...

I've had it for almost 2 years, I think it's past any kind of general warranty.

I'm holding onto hope it maybe something that could be fixable, but may not be entirely obvious. What is discouraging me is I had three other bootable uSD cards, none of which seem to be working now. I'm also not getting any response from the debug USB serial device.

 

[Alperoot]

Never got around to it, as my Devboard appears to be dead. Not entirely sure what happened, but I can't get it to boot or get any response from the serial device. I discovered it frozen and garbled display, it didn't boot after that.

Hmm. I hope you will be able to fix it!

 

[WizardStan]

Well, copying data on a hard drive isn't that different.

we're still talking about a 25MB/s data transfer.

Yes, those are excellent points. I was obviously overzealous.

 

[RubisDrake]

U-boot supports dual-booting, doesn't it?

So in that case I wouldn't see why anyone couldn't be able to boot 2 OSes if they wanted too, even from a single SD card.
In case U-Boot doesn't support it, the technical question to answer is, how does one get an ARM system to dual-boot properly?

I suppose someone could use either a modified U-Boot (which is silly), or just have U-Boot somehow boot into a GRUB menu via initramfs (GRUB can be compiled on ARM) with a menu to, well, dual-boot. I remember SolidRun doing a custom solution for CuBox-i with an installer, where they simply have a downloadable rootfs called Ignition with a menu of things you can install from the Internet (Ethernet or Wi-Fi) and overwrite the SDCard with your OS of choice. Maybe something like this for Pyra would be really nice.

Oh, here's a link to a video:


There is source code for it, though it only supports imx6: https://github.com/SolidRun/ignition-imx6

Maybe if Pyra did have an installer, a dual-boot option should be included. Maybe instead of shipping Pyra with what are basically netinstall images, have them with Pyra OS by default, so you can just exit the installer and go to the default. Idk.

 

[WizardStan]

U-boot supports dual-booting, doesn't it?

It does, and it's pretty trivial: just set a different root argument and load a different kernel. Or the same kernel even.
The Pandora already has the R-Trigger boot menu, it just sets different bootargs depending on selection, so we can do something like this:

setenv bootargs root=/dev/mmcblk0p${partition_number} rw rootwait vram=6272K omapfb.vram=0:3000K mmc_core.removable=0 ext2load mmc 0 0x80300000 /boot/${uImage}
TADA! Format your SD card with 2 (or more) partitions, put one OS on mmcblk0p1 and the other on mmcblk0p2, and then have the boot loader set that partition and the corresponding uImage kernel, or even use the same kernel as I mentioned (which is entirely likely)