Re: Feedback from the community -> ARM
On Sat, 2021-06-12 at 06:17 +0000, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 11, 2021 at 7:25 AM Ralph Aichinger wrote:
>
> > Many criticisms of the RPi that were true 5 years ago no longer
> > hold.
>
> Some of them are still true; the weird GPU-starts-CPU SoC boot
> process,
Is this still true for the Raspberry Pi4 with UEFI?
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4
Even Debian Wiki says
https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi
"All Raspberry Pi models before the 4 (1A, 1B, 1A+, 1B+, Zero, Zero W,
2, 3) boot from their GPU"
So it seems this is no longer true, and exactly what I said.
> blobs required for the boot process,
If there are Blobs needed to bring up the RPi4 they are included
in above UEFi firmware (or the stuff used in other boot mechanisms).
I don't see how this is different from the "blobs" I load when I
boot my UEFi Asus mainboard.
> some Linux kernelpatches are not in mainline etc
What patches do you mean? Patches that are in Debian kernels, but
not in Linus' upstream kernels? Or patches on top of what Debian
does? Because if you mean the latter, than I can assure you, that
the RPi4b runs fine without anything but a stock debian kernel,
both during installation (there the kernel from recent bullseye arm64
netinst works just fine) as in actual use. The kernel I am currently
running is
ii linux-image-5.10.0-7-arm64 5.10.40-1 arm64 Linux
5.10 for 64-bit ARMv8 machines (signed)
directly from Debian archive.
And I stand by my statement: What was true 5 years ago (weird GPU boot,
patched proprietary kernel, architecture that falls right between
armel/armhf in Debian) is no longer true for kernels after 5.10
and with RPi4. The RPi4 works with stock Debian kernels (and supposedly
stock upstream kernels), runs straight arm64 just like other devices
and boots debian netinstall installation directly as long as you copy
it over onto an UEFi partiton with the UEFi EDK2 files included.
> FreedomBox is a Debian blend, so a FreedomBox install *is* a Debian
> install, there are no custom packages or other hacks. At least that
> is how it is claimed to be, I haven't tried it.
I have not tried it either, but I am slightly worried about
small variations in the details. And I do not need the extra
software they install (yes, I could uninstall, of course).
My most recent Pi4 is used for taking backups with restic over
wireguard, so I more or less just need restic, wireguard, and
ssh (plus the usual commandline utilities). It would feel wrong
to install Freedombox, look what has to be uninstalled, look
for potential specific configurations etc.
> I assume because of the proprietary software needed to boot the
> RPi4,a lthough there is a WIP libre replacement that isn't yet in
> Debian, see other comments in the thread about that.
With "WIP libre replacement" do you mean the tianocore/EDK2/UEFi port
here?
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4
Or something else?
/ralph
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