On Wed, Jul 02, 2014 at 10:24:31AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > Platform firmware is an odd beast in the world of software. Thanks for raising this challenging topic! > On ARM the platform firmware is way less standardised but is often > u-boot. u-boot mainline is packaged and apparently has support for 6 > armel devices and 13 armhf devices. And even mainline u-boot isn't very standardized between different platforms. Different variable names for the same functionality, different meanings for the same variable names, etc. This is improving a little upstream, but is currently a mess. I've been working on patching the environments for each of these platforms to have similar boot behavior where feasible. But there are, as you point out, numerous other platforms in u-boot, most of which I'm unable to test... I've been focusing on adding support for platforms which are fairly easy to recover from, reasonably easy to get access to the hardware, and ideally in or on it's way to mainline u-boot, such as the BeagleBone Black, Wandboard, and Cubietruck (mostly mainlined), Cubox-i (not mainlined, patchset maintained by vorlon). Over time, I suspect the easiest to work with hardware will eventually become the best supported hardware... I know I'd rather not fight with the hardware just to be able to run my preferred OS. > I'm thinking we should promote using Free Software where possible and > packaged versions of that Free Software where possible. Agreed! > Due to the possibility of unforeseeable circumstances, that promotion > should probably only consist of a default-to-no suggestion to replace > existing platform firmware if only intending to use Debian on the > device. With something akin to the flash-kernel db (or integrating into flash-kernel?), I think we could get a reasonable estimate of what platforms are safe to automatically update the firmware, and do so for the hard-to-brick platforms, making it easy to opt-out or opt-in as appropriate... I really like the idea of encouraging vendors that properly upstreamed their code by having it working out-of-the-box on Debian. live well, vagrant
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