Re: Official support Odroid hardware and other ARM development boards.
On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 8:54 PM, Reg Lnx <regier.kunkel@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to know if Debian community have plans to officially support
> any of those development boards, providing ready to boot images,
> containing the Debian Installer for example.
hi reg,
this question comes up on a regular basis "i would like to see
{insert custom-designed completely unique} hardware model A using
{custom-designed completely unique} processor B from {competitive and
specialist} manufacturer C working with debian".
it comes up so regularly that it should really have an FAQ answer
(can that be done at all, added somewhere to a debian-arm wiki?)
the clue as to why this is challenging is in the format i've laid out
- the more general form of the question. the first issue is that each
SoC is unique, custom designed *even* from the same manufacturer with
unique ways to access GPIO, interfaces, everything. unlike the
monolithic x86 architecture, there's absolutely *no* common ground.
the second is that each piece of hardware (that's designed around
each of these SoCs with absolutely no common functionality) is again
utterly unique.
now, if the buses (interfaces) on these SoCs were limited to
"self-describing" ones - SATA, USB, PCIe, Ethernet - this wouldn't be
a problem. heyyy yeahhh, let's just plug in some peripherals, they're
detected at run-time, nooo problem, right? ... sounds just like an
x86 system, right? but we're not *in* x86-land.
so instead, we have to customise *the entire* software stack - from
the ground up, for the most ultra-basic and mind-numbing tasks such as
"if you want that USB hub up-and-running, ya gotta pull GPIO pin
A5912315699999 to high for 20ms". i give you that as just one boring
and *simple* example. in many cases it can be far more complex than
that.
now.
against that background, can you appreciate that what you've asked is
as follows:
"i'd like to know if anyone in the Debian community has the desire -
without any form of payment of any kind - to spend several weeks
full-time working through all the issues required, from the ground up
including possible reverse-engineering, possible JTAG debugging,
porting u-boot (possibly up to 3 weeks full time per board), then
porting the kernel (possibly up to 3 weeks per board again of
full-time effort), then finally getting to the O.S., then adding
support to Debian Installer (possibly an additional 3 weeks because
Debian Installer is quite hard to understand and work with)...."
.... and against this time required, exactly how long does one
particular SoC last? (answer: it's about 6-9 months before a better
successor comes along).
does that now make sense, reg, why there are so few ARM systems that
have "official" debian support? or any official OS support at all?
it's a real serious problem - we know. and i told people over 3
years ago that device-tree isn't the answer, because the differences
between SoCs and the hardware systems that use ARM SoCs is simply too
great for device-tree to make any impact. device-tree works
fantastically well in the x86 world (monolithic architecture), really
great where it was designed - for Sun Microsystems (a company with
control over its architecture and its processor lines), really great
for the PowerPC community (small, mostly monolithic architecture).
and no, you can't have a BIOS, because that would require all ARM SoC
licensees - over 650 of them - to communicate and agree. that's not
going to happen. plus it would be runtime overhead that none of them
would accept.
so, bottom line: if you want any particular OS - doesn't matter which
one it is - ported to a specific piece of hardware, you need to
contact someone, pay them some money, and give them a contract to get
the work done. if it's not important, however, you could just wait to
see if someone else does the work. it might happen. but it almost
certainly won't, because the bang-per-buck ratio - due to the
"nova-like" lifetime of ARM SoCs - is very very low.
apologies if that's not what you wanted to hear!
l.
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