Hi Gene, On 2020.03.31 17:41, Gene Heskett wrote:
The only thing that's missing, really, is for Debian folks to integrate the retrofitted Genet network driver, which we submitted 2 months ago, in the vanilla aarch64 installation images...Tweaks my curiosity. That driver doesn't exist in the raspi armhf build from raspbian, yet the networking is flawless. I run a host file based net config, and it Just works.
That's because it uses Device Tree, and the DT based version of the Genet driver has been in the kernel for a while, so it should be mostly okay.
But we have to use ACPI in UEFI for various reasons. The Pi 4 has a few quirks, especially when it comes to DMA and USB, that paradoxically make an ACPI implementation easier to sort out compared to DT. This doesn't mean we won't support DT, just that ACPI is more suitable for now. So we need ACPI bindings in Genet, whereas the existing Genet driver is intended as a DT mode driver.
As a matter of fact, much of what the proposed patch does is add ACPI support to the existing driver.
Also please bear in mind that the Pi Foundation adds a lot of quirks to their 32-bit kernels, some of which have yet to find their way in mainline aarch64. Raspbian is a very custom as a kernel.
Regards, /Pete