Boot process question

RoyK

Hi all

I'm quite familiar with Linux and also how things work with Raspbian, but I was a bit confused when I learned that the Armbian only had a single partition. How does the boot logic work on this?

thanks

roy

igorpec

Raspberry PI is probably the only device which is crippled enough that it can't boot from anything else than FAT partition. Or in other words, having FAT boot in a Linux world is an anomaly, not something normal. Since all  other devices can boot from EXT4, which is a normal/default Linux filesystem, we make use of it. There could be more partitions, but not really needed.

How the boot process looks like into details:
http://linux-sunxi.org/Boot_Process
http://linux-sunxi.org/BROM

RoyK

Well, to be honest, it's a wee bit easier to edit/place files on a small fat32, than to customise a bootblock as described on http://linux-sunxi.org/Bootable_SD_card. I'd choose the raspberry pi way over that any day. It's particularly practical if you're on a windows machine (or even a mac) or just want to do some small changes to the bootup.

igorpec

Well, to be honest, it's a wee bit easier to edit/place files on a small fat32, than to customise a bootblock as described

You don't need to customize boot block. I just point you there to understand the background ... I understood that was your question.

The only thing what you need to fiddle around is:
- inside /boot/armbianEnv.txt
- inside armbian-config which is also a frontend for /boot/armbianEnv.txt

What exactly do you want to change on a boot partition? Can be mounted on MAC/Linux and not on Windows. That is a bit nonpractical for Windows users. Agree. But on the other hand, most such users won't fiddle around boot process in first place ...