[parted-devel] Partition tables and ARM booting

[Brian C. Lane]

On Sat, Dec 09, 2017 at 06:07:09AM +0100, Danny Milosavljevic wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> some ARM CPUs (for example Allwinner A20, Allwinner R40 etc) put the boot block at some weird place which could happen to be right inside a GPT partition table.

Do you have any pointers to documentation? I found an olimex post that
says to write u-boot to 8k.
https://olimex.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/7795/

My kneejerk response to this kind of stuff is 'Why the Hell did the HW
maker do something so dumb'. But that's not very useful :)

So a couple of questions:

1. Why do you need GPT? If it were using UEFI to boot then writing
bootloader code over the partition table area wouldn't be a problem.

2. Why not use MSDOS? Is the disk too big?

I'm more in support of tools specific to these kinds of hardware making
the needed changes than changing parted to work around their bad design
decisions. I'd much rather see someone write a tool to install uboot and
modify the table, since it knows what goofy location it will be
installing it into.

-- 
Brian C. Lane (PST8PDT)