User:Zulu Foxtrott/GentooOnARM/EasyInstall/RockchipPartitionTable

Default partitioning scheme
Throughout the remainder of the instructions, the following partitioning scheme will be used as a simple example layout:

TODO: move note to "designing a partition scheme"

What is the firmware partition?
In contrast to legacy and more traditional hardware, some systems, especially embedded and single board computers, ship without preinstalled firmware (software that performs some of the first steps of hardware initialization upon powering on the system). What used to be readily available as BIOS or UEFI (and thus often stayed untouched by the average user) now needs to be installed as part of the setup process.

The firmware generally used to be provided by the hardware vendor in form of closed source proprietary binary blobs out of the users' control. However, for a growing - but still small - number of systems opensource software can provide the same functionality.

For most systems built around Rockchip SoCs open source U-Boot can be used to bring up the hardware. Still a tiny closed source software blob residing on the SoCs' supposedly immutable integrated BootROM performs the very first steps of initialization and takes care of loading the U-Boot TPL (Tertiary Program Loader), whose main task it is to train the DDR RAM. The TPL then loads the U-Boot SPL (Secondary Program Loader), which in turn is capable of loading the proper bootloader.

The firmware partition is going to house the U-Boot TPL and SPL.

What is the bootloader partition?
The bootloader partition is the partition where the bootloader is installed. In case U-Boot is used, U-Boot Proper - the main U-Boot program - resides here.

What is the EFI System Partition (ESP)?
When installing Gentoo on a system that is going to use UEFI to boot the operating system, then it is important that an EFI System Partition (ESP) is created. The instructions for below contain the necessary pointers to correctly handle this operation.

The ESP must be a FAT variant (sometimes shown as vfat on Linux systems). The official UEFI specification denotes FAT12, 16, or 32 filesystems will be recognized by the UEFI firmware, although FAT32 is recommended for the ESP.