Making your own

Making your own image/installation of Linux for SOQuartz is relatively easy, as all major components are mainlined. You will need:

• A build of mainline U-Boot ≥ v2023.10. Flash this to sector 64 (sector size 512, so byte 32768) of your image for SD or eMMC. It’s prudent to “protect” it by making a small (~16MiB) partition at this offset.
• A mainline Linux kernel ≥ v6.2. See Quartz64/Development#Linux Kernel Config Options for the device specific kernel configuration options.
• The root filesystem of the distribution of your choice. This can be on the same filesystem as your kernel and device tree if using extlinux.conf.

You can either boot the kernel through U-Boot’s EFI booting, in which case it gets its device tree from U-Boot, or mark the partition containing your kernel and device tree with the legacy bootable flag and write an extlinux/extlinux.conf as explained in the U-Boot documentation.