On 2014-09-21 17:17:23 -0500, Karsten Merker wrote: > I believe that on armhf systems a tarball makes more sense than > a disk image for the following reasons: Thanks for working on this! > - We do not install a boot sector on armhf but just a u-boot > script. This is a normal file which can be copied onto a USB > stick with an exiting filesystem of arbitrary size and mostly > arbitrary type (fat16/fat32/ext2/ext3/ext4), so there is no > need to provide a block-wise disk image with a fixed size. > This allows using nearly any exiting usb stick as installation > medium without overwriting the data on it, and it provides > flexibility regarding media size. Sounds good. There are several platforms that do not have u-boot on any sort of built-in media, but it wouldn't be hard to write a script that dumps the tarball and writes u-boot to the media, at least for some "common" platforms. > Due to the diversity of the various armhf platforms and their > (sometimes years-old) u-boot versions, it is nearly impossible to > provide a boot script that works on all of them. Therefore I > target systems which run a current mainline u-boot. Mainline > u-boot 2014.10 (which is planned to go into Jessie) introduces a > common bootcmd handling for all platforms, so that one boot > script can be used on all supported platforms. > > The d-i boot script checks whether it is called on such a modern > u-boot and provides appropriate information when not. Sounds good. Not all platforms seem to have adopted this yet, but it's probably worth considering patching some u-boot platforms to do so in Debian... > I have run some tests with the resulting tarball contents and a > Jesse CD1 iso copied onto a USB stick; booting and detecting the > ISO worked as expected on a Cubietruck (armhf/sunxi) with > mainline u-boot. Which ISO did you use? live well, vagrant
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