In the process of trying to get Linux to boot on my Surface, I wanted to first get a kernel to boot on QEMU as to reduce as much of the work and investigation on the actual device.
Clearly that was a wise choice, as I obviously have no idea what I am doing. This post is to document it and hopefully save others time that might come here with the same questions I initially had.
On last post I got Windows Boot Manager to load GRUB (or what seems like it) on QEMU. Since then I was trying to cross-compile a newer version of GRUB for ARM and then load this newer version, instead of the original EFI partition I used when writing that post. That was harder than I first thought.
I didn’t get it to work. For now I’ll stick with that original GRUB imagine, knowing that the though of it will bug for a while - I got really curious to know how that image was made.
On my quest for Linux on Surface, I got too tiring of rebooting the tablet, tweaking some changes on the bcd store or efi partition, rebooting, failing and redoing the whole cycle again.
Surface has a ARM processor with a UEFI implemented. So I started looking whether I could emulate that setup to iterate more quickly over the changes I wanted to test, and only if they worked on the emulate system, I would go over the trouble of doing them on the actual tablet.
The other day I came across this interesting ebook by 0xAX, which got me interested into the whole x68 boot process.
On the same week, when cleaning up my office, I found my very old Surface tablet that runs Windows RT. My first thought was “can I boot something else in here? Maybe it will boot Linux?” and that was what I set to find out.
The prospect wasn’t promising. Surface ships with UEFI’s secure boot enabled, having the boot loader signed by Microsoft.
