The Flipper One just learned to pick its system - a fresh boot log from R&D

You're waiting for the Flipper One and checking for a release date every other day. There isn't one yet. But a few hours ago Flipper's R&D team showed something that says more about this device than any spec sheet - a working boot menu. A trifle? Only on the surface.

Because how a device boots up tells you what it's really meant to be. And the fresh boot log the developer dropped online lets you look under the Flipper One's hood - before anyone has even bought one.

What exactly happened

A screenshot and a short note showed up on the @Flipper_RND profile: the U-Boot menu is now running on the Flipper One - the bootloader that fires up before Linux even wakes. The menu lets you pick which kernel and in which mode (the so-called systemd target) the system should start.

It's their own U-Boot fork - open, sitting on GitHub - with a slightly modified menu they eventually want to push into mainline U-Boot. For now the developer treats it as a temporary solution for testing. In the final Flipper OS the menu will most likely be drawn by a small program in the initramfs, after the kernel has already started. But - as he put it bluntly - "for now it works perfectly".

Why a boot menu is no small thing

Imagine you grab the device for a job out in the field. One time you need a full desktop with the whole arsenal. Another time - a stripped-down, hardened profile that boots fast and drags nothing extra along. And sometimes your own kernel for one specific experiment.

A boot menu means you decide on every single boot, not the manufacturer for you. That's multiboot DNA - the hardware bends to your workflow, not the other way round. The boot log even shows several ready Debian profiles side by side, including a "nokde" variant - that is, without the heavy KDE desktop. Exactly that philosophy in practice.

What the boot log reveals 🔍

The developer published the full boot log with timestamps, straight from the processor module. For anyone who likes to know what's going on underneath, it's a small goldmine. Here are the most interesting fragments (trimmed):

U-Boot SPL 2026.07-rc4 (Jun 24 2026 - 12:30:28 +0200)
## Checking hash(es) for Image atf-1 ... sha256+ OK
## Checking hash(es) for Image u-boot ... sha256+ OK
## Checking hash(es) for Image tee-1 ... sha256+ OK
NOTICE:  BL31: v2.15.0(release)
I/TC: OP-TEE version: 51d99cd ... aarch64
...
Model: Flipper One rev. F0B0C1
SoC:   RK3576
DRAM:  8 GiB
...
Autoboot in 1 seconds, to stop use 's' key
  1  bls  ready  mmc  /boot/loader/entries/debian-7.1.0-...conf
  5  bls  ready  mmc  /boot/loader/entries/debian-6.1.141.conf

Three things worth catching from it:

• Verified boot. Every component - firmware, U-Boot, the kernel - has its sha256 checksum verified before it even fires up. Swap a single bit and the boot falls over. Security built into the foundation, not bolted on at the end.
• OP-TEE and ARM TrustZone. The device starts with a separate, trusted execution environment - the same mechanism that guards the keys in smartphones. On a tool meant to touch other people's systems, that's not a fancy extra, just common sense.
• A full boot chain like in a grown-up computer: SPL → ARM Trusted Firmware → OP-TEE → U-Boot → menu → Debian. The log even confirms what we already know about the hardware - RK3576 and 8 GiB of RAM. This is no microcontroller. It's a machine.

And one more thing, the part I like best: the developer openly admits he's not happy with the cold boot time. No marketing gloss - just "still too slow, we're working on it". R&D out in the open, with the visor up.

Why they're showing this in public

Because the Flipper One is meant to be open to the core. The U-Boot patch sits on GitHub, and the goal is to push the changes into the mainline kernel and U-Boot - with no closed blobs and no vendor lock. You can literally watch this hardware being born line by line and - if you feel like it - throw in your own.

It's the opposite of a sealed gadget you get in a box with a "do not open" sticker. For the pentesting and tinkerer community, that's actually the single most important promise of the whole project.

What this means for you

Soberly: it's still R&D. There's no release date, no price, and what you see in the log is an early bring-up, not the final product. But the direction is clear - flexible, secure, open. The Flipper One isn't trying to be a "Flipper Zero 2". It's trying to be a pocket computer where you pick how it boots.

If you're only just jumping into the topic and want to know what the Flipper One even is and how it differs from the Zero - we wrote it up here: Flipper One is coming - what we know so far.

And if you want a Flipper in your hand right now instead of waiting - the Flipper Zero is on our shelf and doing its job. We'll add the Flipper One to the line-up the moment it's ready. We're following every commit for you.