Re: Bug#864848: Should not talk about hd-media - that's armhf only

[Karsten Merker <merker@debian.org>]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 08:55:46PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 09:17:22PM +0200, Holger Wansing wrote:
> >On Thu, 15 Jun 2017 22:51:21 +0100
> >Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
> >> Package: installation-guide-armel
> >> Severity: normal
> >> 
> >> As seen in
> >> 
> >>   https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/armel/ch05s01.html.en
> >> 
> >> there's discussion of "unpack the hd-media tarball". This doesn't
> >> exist on armel...
> >
> >Does that mean, that armel does not support that "Boot from USB stick in
> >U-Boot" thingy, described under above link?
> >If that _is_ supported, that chapter needs to be rewritten (simply leaving
> >out the part where the hd-media tarball is mentioned, would make the whole
> >chapter senseless/important part missing).
> 
> To the best of my knowledge, we don't have any such support in the
> armel port. I'd love to be corrected on this, but I don't see anything
> like that in our d-i builds.
> 
> >Adding arm porters to the loop seems to make sense here.
> 
> Nod.

The boot mechanism used by the hd-media tarball is based on a
mainline u-boot feature called "distro_bootcmd", which is enabled
on all modern armhf platforms.  In principle, this feature could
also be enabled in mainline u-boot for armel platforms, but there
are some circumstances that make using this unrealistic for our
current armel targets:

- It requires the use of multiplatform kernels and devicetree
  (as we do on armhf) instead of the platform-specific kernels
  and board files that we have for our traditionally supported
  armel targets.

- Most of our armel targets come with a vendor-uboot in ROM
  that cannot be easily replaced by a current mainline u-boot
  with support for distro_bootcmd.

As a result, we don't build a hd-media tarball for armel.

Regards,
Karsten
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