Re: Summary of the Arm ports BoF at DC17
On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:58:02PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
>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.
Let's be straight - the UEFI boot support in U-Boot is very much a
limited project to ease booting; it's not *at all* a complete
implementation of UEFI like Tianocore. It doesn't support any of the
runtime interfaces, for example.
I stand by my recommendation: for normal use for an end user on an
arm64 machine, UEFI is a better bet than U-Boot.
...
>> 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.
+1
>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/
Alternatively, give up on the ports web pages altogether - IMHO
they're massively more effort to maintain than stuff in the wiki and
that's one of the reasons why they're always so out-dated.
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
You raise the blade, you make the change... You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane...
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