Re: Feedback from the community -> ARM
On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 04:43:44PM +0200, Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> Hello,
>
> next week there is a (virtual) meeting at ARM who invited some people
> involved in Linux on ARM CPUs. One of the topics there is to tell them
> Debian's needs and pain points.
>
> My current list (based on own experience and asking for feedback in
> #debian-arm) currently has:
>
> - Fragmentation
> - Vendor kernels vs. mainline
> This got better in the past is my subjective impression, but it
> still hurts. Device tree made this a tad simpler, but it's not
> unusual to have vendor specific bindings.
> - early boot code
> U-Boot (or general: bootloader) is device specific and more often
> than not there is only a Vendor variant available.
> Also today there are more relevant components: ATF, UEFI/EDK2
> Vendors care at different intensities (and profit from external
> developers) Would Arm Base System Architecture (BSA) help? (This is
> only for AArch64 though, arm32 still relevant for us.)
> - relevant SoC/SBC vendors:
> - Allwinner
> - Broadcom / RaspberryPi Foundation
> - Marvell
> - NXP
> - Odroid
> - Rockchip
> - some more for sure (which?)
> - Graphics
> Similar problematic, vendor blobs vs. OSS
>
> Is there anything on your mind that is missing above and that you'd like to
> be shared with ARM? Feel free to reply here or discuss in #debian-arm. (I'm
> ukleinek there.)
>
> Best regards
> Uwe
>
Just get _someone_ to make a good quality 64 bit server which doesn't cost
the earth and works well with UEFI and relatively standard interfaces
and components.
AMD were doing this n years ago but the devices never got popular/cheap
enough for use. Marvell have the espressobin and macchiatobin - just
get something that looks like a performant mini-ATX / itx board and
can run forever at low power but in a standard form factor.
Andy C.
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