DIY Fully working Alpine Linux for Allwinner and Other ARM SOCs

This is working progress - Till it completes - This is taken from multiple sources and is copyright of the respective authors.

Comprehensive Introduction

Why do we need alpine linux when there are so many xyz distros available? Well it is one the most lightweight platforms with hot swap support for SD-cards and USB devices. There are options for allocation of SD-card free space for application storage.

There are possibilities to completely upgrade a device running remotely with minimum downtime. Console logins are possible with USB null modems for field servicing. Most importantly you can be rest assured that it can survives against power cuts, restarts. For devices based without onboard mmc, especially working on sd-card its although the more important.

The philosophy of commit only when required, keeps the entire OS read-only and in-memory without touching the storage at all. Thus devices can survive for longer times without crash.

Arm devices unlike x86 dont come with bios in general. BIOS in x86 PCs is generally a firmware configuring and connecting the hardware to the operating system and it offers support for a variety of OS and supports new OS versions.

ARM designs use a different approach involving a boot loader for hardware configuration and operating system start-up. The boot loader is developed specifically for the application, adapted to one well-defined hardware configuration, one operating system and only one version of it.

We here generally talk about Allwinner especially H3 SOCs