Re-partitioning; Adding swap partition; Using GPT partitions

[Arwen]

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and yes, about a proper installation, i wrote that too a couple of weeks ago, maybe someone noticed. i am not a linux guy, so I can't try myself in it. but that thing would be very good to have. i don't agree, that it's arm difference though. nothing special, x86 starts its execution at the predefined address aw well, that platform just managed to agree on always having flash chip from which bios runs, starting it all. this mess with uboot pieces being hardcoded at places in the user areas of not so "firmware" storages is mostly due to overlooking on the OS side, linux, in this case  lack of development force, other reasons. should it get enough attention, the only normal place for these pieces are either (in)famous SPI NOR chip, pretty fatty on pine products or, shoul rockchip be not this lazy, the boot areas of eMMC, specifically made for this purpose, leaving all the collisions with user data. then creating a modern GPT laid out disk on user disks would be free of this clumsy stuff.

Ah, you make a good point about the x86/x64 system's BIOS, (or EFI, etc...). They handle all the nitty gritty. So your point about ARM being special is only because in some cases, like our Pinebook Pros, have not, (yet?), implemented BIOS like firmware.

I don't know if the 16MB SPI is large enough for a decent BIOS like interface. We would likely want this;

 - Built in keyboard support
 - USB keyboard support
 - Built in display support, (which might automatically include USB C alternate mode DisplayPort)
 - NVMe boot
 - USB boot
 - And the classics, eMMC & SD boot
 - Plus, parameters to specify boot order or disable bootable USB

Of course, if we truly have a need, we can have a slim BIOS that fits into the SPI. And a larger one that uses SPI and the eMMC boot areas.