Boot an EFI-based Linux kernel on your Surface RT.
A Surface RT with secure boot disabled. Visit Yahallo for more information on how to disable it.
A USB drive, formatted as FAT32 with either MBR or GPT. The partition doesn't require being marked as EFI system partition. Be aware that FAT32 isn't FAT32.
A root filesystem/distro on your SD card (recommended)/internal storage/USB. See root filesystem.
There is a premade ZIP below.
There are prebuilt binaries.
Most people use UEFI shell to chainload an EFI linux kernel. Using UEFI shell gives the option to easily specify and modify the kernel command line.
You may want to use different bootloaders, like GRUB.
Place UEFI shell onto your bootable USB drive (as efi/boot/bootarm.efi) and place the zImage and the tegra30-microsoft-surface-rt-efi.dtb files onto the root of your usb drive.
You will need to create a startup script for UEFI shell:
You may want to change the line that begins with zImage
. It is the kernel command line. root=/dev/mmcblk1p2
is the second partition of the sdcard, change this if you want to use a different device/partition. RPI OS is a recommended distro, as it runs smooth
root=/dev/mmcblk0p2
is a location set to internal storage (eMMC) second partition, set it to this after cloning the installation over to internal storage.
root=/dev/sda2
is a second partition for USB only boot, set it to this if you want to USB boot only
See Kernel parameters for further information.
Extract this ZIP to your USB, and add your zImage and device tree to it. You can find precompiled binaries here.
With the USB drive set up, a distro installed and secure boot disabled, you are ready to boot linux.
Shut the device off
Plug in your USB drive
Boot from the USB
Hold the volume down button
Press the power button for a second
Wait until the surface logo appears
Release volume down
You should see kernel logs onscreen (after a short while (15 seconds), wait for 1 minute if nothing happens try again)
If you have any issues, feel free to contact us on discord.
With the method shown above, you will need your USB always on hand to boot linux. You can also install these boot files on the internal storage.
The easiest method is to just clean the windows boot files from the EFI partition, and replace them with the contents of your USB drive.
This will make you unable to boot Windows!
It is possible to make Windows and Linux dual-boot. For example, you can use GRUB.
Replace the contents of your startup.nsh on the USB with the following:
After booting, it will copy the devicetree, zImage and the startup-system.nsh over to the EFI partition on the internal storage. Fill your startup-system.nsh with the linux boot commands. (The commands you normally have in your startup.nsh)
This method is also useful for updating the device tree and zImage, if you already have existing linux files there.