> 1. We have a widespread piece of hardware. > 2. We prepare a Replicant microsd card for that specific hardware. > 3. We, somehow, modify the device's internal memory, so that we can choose to boot either the original/almost intact vendor-provided android from internal memory, or free and customized Replicant from microsd.
In most cases, you cannot decide where the bootloader should boot from. I know that on the Nexus S, it boots from NAND first and the only way of changing the boot order is to move some resistors on the board. It then can boot from UART (perhaps MMC too) but you still need a signed binary. There is however a possibility to chainload u-boot (with a proprietary and signed BL1) and then make it boot from MMC or NAND. On most Android phones, the best we found to do multi-boot is to use the recovery partition with a kernel that will mount partitions not from NAND, but from the sdcard. For instance, you'd have Android on NAND and GNU/Linux on sdcard, with the Android kernel on the boot partition and the GNU/Linux kernel on the recovery partition. Most devices have a key combination to boot directly to recovery, so that would work. Then you could also flash u-boot on kernel and make it load the kernel from somewhere else, that could make it do multi-boot as well. -- Paul Kocialkowski, Replicant developer Replicant is a fully free Android distribution Website: http://www.replicant.us/ Redmine: http://redmine.replicant.us/
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