Providing (armhf) u-boot images together with d-i images?

[Karsten Merker <merker@debian.org>]

Hello,

several armhf systems do not have u-boot (or another firmware) in
non-volatile (i.e. ROM/Flash) memory, but instead store their
system firmware on a removable medium such as an SD card.  In
many cases the user does not receive a suitable firmware medium
when buying the hardware, because the vendors often expect these
devices to be used with pre-built android images.  This means
that a user who has freshly bought such a system and wants to
install Debian on it, has to first find and install an appropriate
u-boot image to be able to start d-i.

Debian provides appropriate u-boot images for several supported
systems in the u-boot-{exynos,imx,omap,sunxi} packages, but those
are not easily accessible to somebody who does not already run a
Debian/armhf system (or at least Debian on another architecture),
so I am wondering whether we should offer these u-boot images
(in unpacked form) together with the d-i images, similar to what
we do with the device-tree files extracted from the linux-image
package.

Comments welcome :-).

Regards,
Karsten
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