Libem phone and Tails

Hi everybody ! :slight_smile:

Is it possible to boot a Librem phone on a usb stick of Tails ?
I haven’t a Librem phone yet, so I’d like to know…

Thanks for your answers.

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Who dares, wins.

Currently, no.

This is what you will want to track as it is the primary pre-requisite https://public-redmine-archive.tails.boum.org/code/issues/10972/

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Also currently “no” because you can’t boot the Librem 5 from USB stick at all?

However I believe that is theoretically fixable either by extending the boot support or by doing a chained boot. (A chained boot is probably acceptable in the use case where Tails is actually required but only the individual customer can decide.)

So let’s say that Tails were available for ARM and with enough relevant hardware support even to boot on the Librem 5 … for the moment you would be left with installing Tails onto the eMMC drive and that gets away somewhat from what Tails is trying to achieve.

PS I love that people are even asking questions like this !

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Tails on Librem 5 would really be amazing. Perfect for traveling to untrusted places.

Unfortunately Tails isn’t available for ARM, although the Tails developers have been thinking about it for quite a while:

I think that means that uboot can load from USB when the phone is connected to a host computer (and the host computer is running uuu) i.e. serial downloader mode.

I don’t think uboot can load from USB when a client device such as a disk presenting as a USB mass storage class device is connected to the USB port and hence also can’t load from the uSD card because that shows up as a USB device (i.e. a USB-based card reader internally)

e.g. as discussed here Librem5 sd and boot order

So e.g. either a USB flash drive or a USB portable drive would be ruled out for now.

While the bootloader can’t be loaded from there, the new u-boot based on up-to-date mainline version can access USB devices including the SD card now (but it’s not being installed by default yet).

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