Bootable images for single board computers (SBCs) are currently tailored for a specific board - even boards sharing the same SoC have to use separate image files. This either causes several almost identical images being provided or only very few boards being supported. The talk will present a single image designed to boot various ARM64 based SBCs, including boards from different SoC vendors, like Allwinner and Rockchip. It uses the different start sector used by the SoC families, with some tweaks to allow coexistence between the different firmware components, plus some runtime detection of the SoC and DRAM chips used. This can be used for instance by distributions to provide generic distribution installer images.
Speakers: Andre Przywara