Re: Donation of a Calxeda Highbank node
On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 07:27:54PM +0000, David Power wrote:
> Hey Guys, I stumbled upon this thread while trying to investigate if
> debian would work on the calxeda platform. We're one of calxedas partners
> and have specific customers who would really love to see debian working on
> ours/calxedas platform.
>
> Can I ask how far your efforts in porting have gone? Is there a wheezy
> release for highbank that we could test out internally?
Well I highly doubt that will happen. Wheezy is released and uses 3.2
kernel which is certainly too old to work with this new hardware.
Would http://packages.debian.org/jessie/linux-image-3.9-1-vexpress by
any chance be a valid kernel image for the highbank? I see in the git
logs of Linus's tree that there is a v7 multiplatform config that is
supposed to cover the highbank, socfpga, mvebu, and vexpress in one
kernel, so having a vexpress kernel in jessie could be a promising sign
for the next major release.
> I would be more than happy to make some hardware available remotely for
> you to use as a second build/test server. We have genuine demand for
> debian on our platform. I'd also be happy to get involved in any way I can
> to help out.
Well certainly I don't think there is a chance to be an officially
supported piece of hardware until the next major release (in a couple
of years, or whatever the release schedule is like these days).
Now you could of course build a newer kernel, and install everything
else from wheezy, and that should work fine, but it won't officially
be Debian, and updates to the kernel for security and such would not be
Debian's doing.
Other than booting and the kernel, it is just yet another arm system
though, so wheezy should work fine, otehr than the boot/kernel part.
I am of course not in any way official Debian anything, just a long time
user of Debian on many architectures and machine types, but I think I
have a decent understanding of how things work.
--
Len Sorensen
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