Here you will find everything related to Linux on Surface RT

The 2 ways of booting

EFI Boot

EFI booting is the recommended and easier way of booting linux. Advantages is support of all 2 GB. Disadvantage is worse performance because of L2 cache, CPU Idle and missing Dynamic voltage & frequency scaling (DVFS).

You will need an USB drive to boot Linux. (SD card; not strictly required)

APX Boot

Using APX mode to boot Linux is harder. But you have a decent performace boost with it. The features that make the performance boost are CPU Idle, L2 cache and Dynamic voltage & Frequency scaling (DVFS). Disadvantages is the missing 1 GB memory.

You will need a USB A-to-A cable and an SD card.

Features

• Screen (LVDS encoder, backlight)

• ​Touchscreen​

• ​UART A​

• ​SD Card (+UHS-I mode)

• USB

• 2 GB DDR3 RAM (only 1 GB for APX)

• ​SPI Bootflash​

• ​eMMC​

• HDMI

• Vol+/-, PWR, Windows Buttons

• Touch-/Type-/Powercover (EFI only) (+ hotplug detection, suicide detector sensor hall effect lid sensor)

• CPU temperatur sensors.

• Wifi

• Audio

• Battery

What's Missing?

• Hardware Acceleration

• Bluetooth

• Camera

• Some sensors (e.g. rotation sensor)