Re: Re: Fwd: On a Samsung ARM Chromebook, could nv-uboot easily boot to stock linux kernels, by way of ARM-GRUB?

[Ian Campbell]

On Fri, 2014-01-10 at 13:03 +0400, Held Bier wrote:
> Ian,
> 
> 2014/1/10 Ian Campbell <address@hidden>:
> > On Fri, 2014-01-10 at 10:57 +0400, Held Bier wrote:
> >> Marcin,
> >>
> >> > But you get working virtualisation with proper U-Boot.
> >>
> >> Yes, it's a must for KVM, but Xen for Chromebook still has a secure
> >> mode escape hack in it's tree, and hence, can be booted from stock
> >> U-boot.
> >
> > This escape hack was removed from Xen mainline months ago -- are you
> > using some old version?
> 
> Yes, it was. But i meant an old people/aperard/xen-arm -b
> chromebook-2013-03-22 which "Xen ARM with Virtualization
> Extensions/Chromebook" page at Xen's wiki refers on.
> 
> >
> > I would strongly recommend that if you want to try to get Xen onto a
> > Chromebook that you use the latest Xen mainline along with a suitably
> > virtualisation enabled U-boot. There have been numerous improvements to
> > the platform support and hardware compatibility side of things since
> > that hack existed.
> 
> Indeed, there is a progress going on ARM platform support in general,
> but Chromebook isn't an official Xen port, right?

It's not in the mainline tree yet, if that's what you mean. If someone
can get it into a state where it is working then we'd be happy to take
the patches. (Although we are frozen for the 4.4 release so they would
either need to be restricted to chromeos specific code or wait for 4.5
development to open in a month or so)

> From Stefano 
> [http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-arm/2013-09/msg00001.html]:
> "we didn't make any more progress on the Chromebook port so the page
> above 
> [http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_ARM_with_Virtualization_Extensions/Chromebook]
> is the most recent information we have on it."
> And this page points to aperard's repos for both xen and kernel, so
> either wiki's page isn't updated, or the work on Chromebook hadn't
> been merged into Xen mainline.

Right. That wiki page is misleading -- the chromebook stuff was a WIP
development effort which was never brought to the point of fully working
before it stalled.

Anthony -- please can you update the wiki page please with whatever the
best current advice is, whether that is "take this branch and rebase it
onto something more recent" or "this obsolete branch exists but doesn't
work, best advice is to start over with something newer" or whatever.

Held -- as you are probably gathering you are going to have to do some
development work if you want to run Xen on your chromebook at this
stage. We are happy to provide guidance (probably best to take this
upstream) but it is going to need a certain amount of lowlevel hacking
skills -- especially given the lack of serial console on the chromebook
(unless you have soldered one on).

Ian.