Re: Mainstream Debian on Raspberry Pi 2
On Tue, 2015-12-01 at 09:20 +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> 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:
> >>> 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?
> >> 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.
> >
> > 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/firmware
>
> He 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."
Great, that's an improvement over /boot for sure.
> > [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.
Thanks, that's about how I understood it to be.
Ian.
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