Ian Campbell wrote:
On Mon, 2015-11-30 at 14:03 +0100, Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:W dniu 30.11.2015 o 13:52, Mark Morgan Lloyd pisze:Probably when r/pi2 will be supported by mainline kernel. Up to this moment you have to use "non-standard repositories and packages" to get kernel/bootloader to get board booting into standard Debian userspace.I've been playing with Debian for the RPi2 (not the original RPi) from http://sjoerd.luon.net/posts/2015/02/debian-jessie-on-rpi2/ and find that it fairly readily accepts standard packages- XFCE, KDE and so on. However it still relies on a mix of standard and non-standard repositories and packages, can anybody comment to whether a forthcoming mainstream Debian will support this platform out of the box?What's the status of the r/pi2 bootloader? Is it the same[0] binary blob (presumably non-free) in an VFAT partition on the SDCARD stuff as required on r/pi1?
Yes, mounted on /boot/firmwareHe explains: "This is because the VideoCore expects the first partition to be a FAT filesystem, but mounting FAT on /boot really doesn't work right on Debian systems as it contains files managed by dpkg (e.g. the kernel package) which requires a POSIX compatible filesystem."
[0] nb: Everything I know of r/pi* here is based on rumour and hearsay...
In which case as a bit more detail: there are basically two processors on an RPi, the semi-documented "VideoCore" reads files from a FAT filesystem into memory and then starts Linux. It works fairly well, but does mean that it's not possible to install something like U-Boot or OpenFirmware to take control immediately after a reset, there's an inescapable lower-level loader.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]