Re: Official support Odroid hardware and other ARM development boards.
Thank you Karsten.
It answers a lot of questions and it makes sense. I think we can say the
very same about the odroid, it has some non free things too.
So it looks like we still don't have a 100% open source computer.
On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 23:07 +0100, Karsten Merker wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 05:54:47PM -0300, Reg Lnx wrote:
>
> > Some distros have official support to several ARM development boards.
> > ArchLinux - http://archlinuxarm.org/
> > Fedora Project - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM
> > OpenSUSE - http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Supported_ARM_boards
> >
> > Those distros do officially support several Open Source ARM development
> > boards, such as Raspberry Pi, PandaBoard, BeagleBoard and Odroid U/X
> > series.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > I am a owner of a Raspberry Pi Model B rev 1 and an Odroid u3.
> > To get Debian on these board I have to relay on the Raspbian Community
> > work (And they have done a wonderful work) and on generously built
> > images for the Odroid hardware.
> >
> > Debian is my OS of choice and it would be wonderful if I could use it on
> > all my devices and get packages and updates from Debian.
>
> As far as I can tell there will probably never be direct support for
> the Raspberry Pi in Debian (in contrast to Raspbian) for mainly two
> reasons. One is the CPU instruction set architecture on the Pi, which
> uses an ARMv6 CPU while the minimum requirement for the Debian armhf
> port is an ARMv7 CPU, so the Debian armhf packages cannot run on the
> Pi's CPU.
>
> Using the Debian armel (soft-float) port on the Pi would be technically
> possible CPU-wise, but as armel targets CPUs way older than the one in
> the Pi and does not use the CPU's floating point unit, it would be very
> slow for many applications, so it does not really make sense to do it.
>
> Raspbian is a very fine distribution for the Pi and as far as I know,
> it provides nearly all Packages which are available in Debian armhf,
> but built for the Pi's CPU.
>
> Another problem is the firmware issue on the Pi. Booting the Pi
> requires a set of non-free firmware files to be present on the boot
> device. Due to them being non-free, those cannot be part of Debian
> main, so they cannot be included in the official Debian installer
> images which contain only free software.
>
> I have no personal experience with the other ARM boards you have
> mentioned, so I would just like to point out a few general issues.
> Many arm boards do not work with the official "mainline" Linux kernel,
> but instead need specific kernels from the board vendor or they need
> patches to the mainline kernel which are incompatible with support for
> other boards. For Debian it is not feasible to support lots of
> different kernel source trees for different boards, so one requirement
> for support in Debian is that the board can run a kernel built from the
> mainline kernel source. Similar requirements exist for the bootloader
> used to boot the board (often u-boot). Due to lack of experience with
> the boards you have mentioned, I cannot tell whether these requirements
> are fulfilled for those boards.
>
> I hope that at least partially answers your question.
>
> Regards,
> Karsten
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