Re: Running Pure Debian on the Raspberry Pi 3B+?
On Thursday 16 August 2018 11:09:39 Alan Corey wrote:
> Debian on a Pi means you don't/cant' have the whole /opt/vc userland
> stuff, some of which came from Broadcom. Without that the Pi is just
> a slow computer.
And its slow because with the exception of spi and wifi, everything has
to fight for a time slot in the internal usb-2 hub it uses as a gateway
to talk to the rest of its i/o. But its a very small pinhole.
> The magic is probably Pi-specific
The rpspi.ko spi driver included now with LinuxCNC, is 100% gplv2, and
extremely specific to the gpio in the pi-3b.
And it would make one hell of an spi driver for anything else with gpio,
but would need to be stripped of its pi-3b detectors and ported to the
newer gpio's shipping today. My thinker is 83 yo, and after a pulmonary
embolism 3 years back is no longer capable of that.
> but
> /opt/vc/src/hello_pi has working examples of things like OpenGL ES and
> the assembly code to do an FFT on the GPU. I tried straight Debian,
> on 2 of 3 machines I'm sticking with Raspbian.
So am I. My one working pi-3b install is raspian jessie, solid as a
block of granite unless a disk has been added or subtracted since the
last session of nano/geany adding them to /etc/fstab, otherwise it runs
an 11x36 Sheldon lathe for me from power outage to power outage. I need
to label the partitions, and edit fstab accordingly. For some reason,
blkid's do not seem to be the answer, I think because they change
according to which usb socket they are plugged into.
Sadly I cannot make a similar claim about stability for stretch.
> The folks at
> https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/ are pretty good too, some of the
> original Pi engineers are in there.
And sadly, deaf to any requests involving LinuxCNC, which needs at least
a fully preemptable kernel to run. RTAI or *enomai might work, but
hasn't been tried.
> On 8/15/18, Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> wrote:
> > On Wednesday 15 August 2018 03:44:00 Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> >> > On 8/14/18, Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br> wrote:
> >> >> I am thinking of getting a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and, from what I
> >> >> read, it is mostly supported by the upstream Linux kernel, but I
> >> >> still have doubts about
> >> >> what I may be losing or not, compared to Raspbian.
> >> >>
> >> >> >From what I read, there are some binary blobs needed for the
> >> >> > video to work
> >> >>
> >> >> (and I would like to use it with Kodi, to play some videos and
> >> >> to, perhaps, act as a NAS or a place where I can use to save
> >> >> some files via NFS when a USB HD is attached to it).
> >>
> >> Apologies for missing the original message which for some reason
> >> got marked as spam/malware.
> >>
> >> We're running a number of RPi3s here with the "Jessie" build done
> >> by Collabora, which relies on the Raspbian kernel and loader (hence
> >> also any proprietary binaries), originally because KDE didn't play
> >> nicely with Raspbian. I've also looked briefly at somebody's 64-bit
> >> port.
> >>
> >> My suggestion would be to stick with Raspbian unless you have a
> >> very good reason to explore alternatives.
> >
> > I've gone back to armbian stretch on the rock64. Its networking init
> > will at least accept a gateway argument in /etc.network/interfaces.
> > debian-arm stretch will not, so you can get all over ones local
> > network, but cannot use the gateway to install any updates that
> > might fix that.
> >
> > Questions asked here re the lack of a gateway when it IS assigned
> > haven't been answered with a solution that worked with the exception
> > that someone did give me the correct syntax to make it work with
> > "route" after the boot and login, something the man page for route
> > doesn't make clear. And I am not convinced it even executes
> > /etc/rc.local as I tried to put that command in as a shell util, and
> > it was ignored on reboot.
> >
> > Armbian Just Works with the exception that its sd /boot partition is
> > too small to allow a full completion of a kernel update, but on
> > reboot, it has worked. When we use a 32GB (or even larger) sd card,
> > we gain years before the card fails, and there is no valid excuse
> > for a /boot partition so small its unable to hold 2 or even 3,
> > bootable kernel versions.
> >
> > I have yet to make the rock64's do what I bought them for, but hold
> > out hope that they may someday, when the coder folks userstand some
> > of us did NOT buy them to make a media server. We want to run
> > potentially dangerous machinery, which requires a realtime kernel,
> > and in the case of the rock64, access to the spi (gpio pins)
> > interface(s) at 50 megabaud speeds. The pi CAN do it at 42 megabaud
> > w/o breaking a sweat.
> >
> > Thats a roadblock I expect will eventually be fixed with a new spi
> > driver. But I'm not reading any rumors yet. :)
See above, the src code for rpspi.ko is available and gplv2.
--
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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