Re: MBR partition table and the "active" flag

[Harold Gutch <logix%foobar.franken.de@localhost>]

Hi,

I finally got to looking into this again.

On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 12:16:08PM +0200, Harold Gutch wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> not *entirely* related, but possibly relevant.
> 
> On Sun, May 19, 2019 at 10:32:07AM -0700, Jason Thorpe wrote:
> > 1-- Do any of the other SoCs actually care about the ACTIVE flag?  If not, perhaps the right fix is to not set it when the image is built.
> 
> Per default, U-Boot seems to check for the flag at last on some
> targets.

That was correct for the most part, in its default configuration
U-Boot searches for certain files to load on all "bootable" ("active")
partitions.  What I had missed before is that if there is no active
partition, it does all this on the first (usually the FAT) partition
instead.

In conclusion - the Pinebook (and probably all other SoCs using
U-Boot, too) will continue to boot even if the active flag in the first
partition is cleared.

Sorry for the false alarm before.


  Harold