aarch64-chromebook rootfs has been unbootable for a while

[ryjelsum]

Hello ALARM people,

Recently tried to install on my Samsung Chromebook Plus (kevin, xe513c24) and discovered that the ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-chromebook-latest.tar.gz rootfs has been unbootable on its target systems for quite a while, or at least on my target system. The ChromeOS kernel partition is only allowed to be at maximum 32mb, but the vmlinux.kpart in the /boot/ folder is 33-34 MB and cannot be DDed to the kernel partition. Expanding the partition does not work, it seems that the 32MB is a restriction of whatever bootloader Google uses on these devices.

Here are some threads where people have reported this issue in the past:

viewtopic.php?f=67&t=15290

viewtopic.php?f=65&t=14727

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=15392

viewtopic.php?f=65&t=14682 (includes patch specific to rockchip devices)

I hope this helps to fix the issue.

(As an aside, I've also been unable to boot into the more platform specific ArchLinuxARM-gru rootfs despite the vmlinux.kpart in that one being properly sized. Similar issues have been reported as well in one of the threads I have linked, just for a different device. While it attempts to boot, it hangs at a black screen. I'm almost certain it's unrelated to this, however, and I haven't done a deep dive to figure out what the issue may be.)