[Gta04-owner] QtMoko v49

[Radek Polak]

On Thursday, November 22, 2012 02:36:23 PM Neil Jerram wrote:

> Out of interest, could it also help with simulating a multiple partition
> environment, to allow the current Replicant to run without really having
> the separate partitions that it requires?

No, replicant has hardcoded 3 partitions for various purposes. I have modified 
it and got replicant running from single partition (or with gta04 init from 
qtmoko partition subdir). Bootloaders cant help here...

> 1. We need to go back to the points that kicked off this discussion, namely
> (a) that some new GTA04 owners had accidentally messed up their boot
> system, and (b) that we want an overall setup that nicely supports
> multiple distributions.

It was meesed because QtMoko shipped old bootloader - qtmoko-fat-vXX file. It 
was IIRC needed for old A3 models which did not have bootloader installed and 
for the several bootloader upgrades - like for enabling 800mHZ.

QtMoko no longer ships bootloader so this is forever fixed. It has nothing to 
do with gta04-init.

> 2. I don't like the asymmetry in your recommended partitioning scheme -
> i.e. that a distribution can go in four slightly different places:
> primary/root, primary/subdir, extended/root and extended/subdir.  It makes
> gta04 more difficult to understand, and appears to require foresight in
> partition planning.
>
> If primary/subdir has no disadvantages, can gta04-init be simplified to
> support only that method, and still allow any number of OSes?

The gta04-init can boot from whatever you tell it and is so simple that it can 
be hardly simplified more [1].

> Then we could just have:
> 
> p1: gta04-init and rescue
> p2: distributions
> p3: media etc.
> 
> In the hope that this is helpful...

But this is the scheme that qtmoko currently uses, check README here [2].

But with this scheme you dont have extended partitions. They can be quite 
useful. Also if you install 5 distros on p2 partition the filesystem will most 
likely slow down a bit...

Regards

Radek

[1] https://github.com/radekp/gta04-init/blob/master/gta04-init.c
[2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtmoko/files/GTA04/