Re: Summary of the Arm ports BoF at DC17
On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 10:40 AM, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> It's possible to replace the installed U-Boot
> on many boards, but that depends on hardware support being properly
> upstreamed; lack of that upstreaming work is another common bugbear in
> vendor U-Boot binaries. If you want to use your arm64 machine as a
> *computer*, my recommended route is UEFI; this is why all the server
> vendors have gone that route.
Doesn't the same problem of u-boot upstreaming also apply to
UEFI/TianoCore upstreaming (but worse)? AFAICT we do not have *any*
support in our edk2 source package for anything other than virtual
machines (x86/ARMv7/ARMv8). It seems to me that u-boot is in a much
better position wrt upstream support for ARM *and* for support for
UEFI than TianoCore or other options that aren't in Debian like
coreboot.
> Hector asked about the current state of the less well-known Arm ports:
> big-endian versions and arm64ilp32. Lots of different BE ports have
> happened over the years, for various reasons. arm64ilp32 [8] is the
> arm64 equivalent of x32 on x64-64; IMHO there is no need for it in
> Debian as a mainstream port. Wookey is working on it in Linaro at the
> moment. There is a BE version too. While x32 *might* have some
> performance wins over i386 (depending on code), it's not clear that
> arm64ilp32 is likely to be any better than armhf (A32) in most cases.
Wookey, could you add something about the motivation for arm64ilp32 to
the wiki page about it?
> Last question: what should people do to keep armel? Main things:
>
> * deal with armel-specific bug reports
For some reason there isn't an armel usertag but there is an eabi one:
https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?tag=eabi&user=debian-arm%40lists.debian.org
> * get involved in toolchains and make sure they continue to work
Join the #debian-toolchain IRC channel and tell doko you are there to
support armel.
Also:
Test that d-i and other installation methods work.
Test that u-boot works for armel devices:
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=u-boot
Fix the issues mentioned on the buildd page:
https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=armel&suite=sid
Improve the release team's arch qualification status for armel:
https://release.debian.org/testing/arch_qualify.html
Monitor the rebootstrap for armel and fix any issues that come up,
join #debian-bootstrap and mention your interest to helmut.
https://wiki.debian.org/HelmutGrohne/rebootstrap
Package and test the RPi open firmware:
https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware
Improve the wiki page for armel, move it under the Ports hierarchy and
base it off the port template:
https://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort
https://wiki.debian.org/Ports
https://wiki.debian.org/PortTemplate
Improve the web page for the ARM ports.
https://www.debian.org/ports/arm/
Extend architecture support for some services:
https://ci.debian.net/status/
https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/reproducible.html
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-live-builds/
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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