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. I thought of recording whatever I found so far, in case I decide to continue investigating this in the future, or someone else is trying the same thing.
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. In short, this means that any other code that runs after that needs to be trusted by the same party that signed the boot loader.
