On the one hand, PINE64 is advancing the development of PinePhone with the recent announcement of the next Community Edition of PinePhone Manjaro (CE), on the other hand, more and more PinePhone DIYers are experimenting with it to innovate something new.
A few months ago, we reported on the existence of a new multiboot loader, PineLoader, for PinePhone. Now I want to introduce you to another new "p-boot" boot loader project, which I came across recently.
p-boot: a PinePhone boot loader with GUI menu
As p-boot developer Ondrej Jirman (aka "megi") puts it, p-boot is one of the smallest and fastest GUIs with a smartphone bootloader. It is partly based on the open source Universal Bootloader (U-Boot) and Linux code.
He recently released p-boot bootloader with GUI boot menu support, cleanup, and support for the 3 GB variant of PinePhone "Convergence Package", which was introduced in PinePhone postmarketOS CE.
Unlike other boot loaders like U-boot, p-boot is very fast as it takes 30-60 milliseconds to boot. Then, to load the kernel images from eMMC or SD card, p-boot additionally takes about 150 milliseconds (~ 600 ms for SD card).
Speaking of being small, the current size of p-boot is 31KB with display support enabled. If you disable GUI support, its size is reduced to 25 KB.
p-boot also offers flexible boot source options such as support for multiple boot configurations on SD and eMMC cards. It even has the ability to load the bootloader from an SD card, but reads the boot data from eMMC.
How to get p-boot?
If you want to know more about the p-boot project, skip here. As the project is open source under GPLv3, you can also join the development and contribute to its hosted git repository here.
To get started, read the READ ME file that contains all building information from installation to p-boot boot process.
