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Re: Feedback from the community -> ARM



W dniu 10.06.2021 o 16:43, Uwe Kleine-König pisze:

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?

Sorry if it offends someone but I see Debian Arm team to be more Debian Arm SBC team. Sure, it is most of available hardware as it includes Windows-on-Arm laptops and Apple M1 systems too but Arm world has also something outside of SBC.

My questions (probably get ignored):

1. When CBSA spec gets released? It is mentioned in BSA spec but
   not public.
2. Are there plans to enforce BSA compliance for new designs?
3. How many years we need to wait for Arm systems to work out-of-
   the-box? I mean unpack, connect input/video/power, boot generic
   distro installer, install, reboot and use. So far there are
   nearly no such ones outside of server space.


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