Re: Debian on Raspberry Pi and Pine* and probably ARM support in general (was Re: Debian on Pine64 H64B?)
On Saturday 04 September 2021 11:31:11 Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> On 2021-09-04, LinAdmin wrote:
> > The unnamed decision makers of Debian some unknown time ago
> > decided that Pi and Pine stuff won't be supported by Debian.
>
> I personally have added support in Debian for:
>
> Raspberry Pi 1
> Raspberry Pi 2b
> Raspberry Pi 3b+
> Pine64+
> Pinebook
> Pinebook Pro
> RockPro64
> Rock64
I wish I had known that 2 years ago, I bought a couple rock64's but all I
could find was armbian, whose kernel had milliseconds of IRQ latency
times. Totally unsuitable for running real hardware that may need
guidance in a 5 microsecond time frame.
> And other platforms... others have added support for other Raspberry
> PI and Pine64 platforms, as well as numerous other platforms...
>
> I used the Pinebook as my primary computer for over a year, using
> absolutely zero software from outside of Debian...
>
My how to questions were asked in order that the answers might get more
publicity. Unforch instead of answers which would have facilitated that
progress, but I was told instead to take it to the main list,
repeatedly.
And no one on the main list is even aware there are arm cpus fully
capable of doing these jobs. And with 2 exceptions, no one has had any
interest in how I did it. And only one was able to follow my directions
to a running system.
> Debian isn't a consumer product, it is a community project.
I am well awsre of that.
> It is
> largely a volunteer effort, suppored by the community, so... if you
> want something supported, please help to add the support.
I have made the offer, and I wrote it up where anyone with a browser can
read the blow by blow. According to the logs, I guess this was not the
list to tell, that readme has been looked at 3 times now in about 2
years.
Yes, I block the bots who must think I have I have a 50 gigabyte pipe,
but its ADSL at 10 megaBITs down. So I understandably block the bots so
that normal folks can get a byte out edgewise. However there are bots
that think robots.txt does not apply to them, so they get blocked with
a /8. If you are a customer of such a company to deserve the /8, my
sympathies, but you are still blocked. Change your ISP. It really is
that simple, refuse to support those that ignore the rules.
> It pretty much comes down to submitting patches, bug reports, merge
> requests, etc. to enabled the appropriate kernel options, bootloader
> support, and debian-installer support.
>
Such howto questions have been ignored and/or rejected in the past. That
was the response at the time. If you now have a new broom, I'd be glad
to help, but what I've done and which still works well, is also out of
date. Meaning I should probably try and build a 5.something kernel.
But its running well on a
4.19.71-rt24-v7l+ #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Thu Feb 6 07:09:18 EST 2020 armv7la
kernel for me. Absolute IRQ latency, worst case while running FF to
browse the web, 50 microseconds, 4 to 12 doing other things, the rp4b
multitasks well.
> Debian doesn't generally support patches that wouldn't be acceptible
> in upstream projects,
I have yet to find anything this kernel above cannot do.
> or support non-free binary blobs out of the box,
> so maybe the support isn't as good on a per-platform basis as some
> other targeted distros willing to use vendor forks or patches for
> various components.
>
>
> The support isn't always perfect; maybe all features don't always
> work; I don't and can't personally test all combinations of features
> on all platforms, nor have the time to enable all features on all
> combinations of platforms. Thankfully, there are others in the
> community who test and improve what they can.
>
> Debian could always use more people helping with testing and perhaps
> more importantly, upstreaming of support to make sure it works for
> their use-cases...
>
> I know not everybody can dive in and fix all kinds of issues, but
> there is a pretty broad spectrum of ways to help out... sometimes
> things are even supported but undocumented. Documenting workarounds
> and filing bug reports appropriately is one angle that could
> potentially help.
>
> > I switched to Ubuntu LTS which made me (and many others) happy.
>
> Curious what exactly is different with Ubuntu that makes it work for
> you...
>
>
> live well,
> vagrant
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)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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