Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
And I have a question: as the Debian installer takes the arch armhf in charge, do you think a standard install' from a netboot image will work ?this has been on my list for a loooong time. as with *all* debian installer images however you are hampered by the fact that there is no BIOS - at all - on ARM devices - and therefore it is impossible to have a "one size fits all" debian installer.I wonder if the device tree is the answer here. If the box comes with a DT or one is available on the web then the installer could read it and know what to install. That and the armmp kernel should solve the problem.you'd think so, and it's a very good question, to which the answer could have been and was predicted to be "not a snowbal in hell's chance", even before work started on device tree, and turns out to *be* "not a snowball in hell's chance" which i believe people are now beginning to learn, based on the ultra-low adoption rate of device tree in the ARM world (side-note: [*0]).
[Grimace] DeviceTree works up to a point on SPARC and PPC Macs, where there is a limited number of peripheral device types and (in general) they're described by published data. Part of that success though is because these machines also expose a standardised UI (OpenPROM or whatever you want to call it) which developers can use for manual enumeration and debugging and which the kernel can use provided that it gets the calling convention right (I've seen a firmware change on SPARC break the kernel).
Leaving aside the more esoteric peripherals (sending morse using a camera flash LED or whatever :-) there are at least t^Hfour problems:
i) There's no standardised interface to get at the configuration.ii) It's not self-describing, particularly in the case of GPIO-attached peripherals.
iii) It's no replacement for enumerating PCI-attached peripherals. iv) It's no replacement for enumerating chips on a JTAG loop.Put another way, Cory Doctorow's "InstallParty" software isn't even science fiction: it's pure fantasy, and is likely to stay that way.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]