Re: Just tried arm64 netinstall on a bananai-m5
On Tue, Aug 15, 2023 at 04:08:02PM -0400, gene heskett wrote:
> On 8/15/23 14:57, peter green wrote:
> > On 15/08/2023 17:44, gene heskett wrote:
> > > used dd to write the arm64-bookworm-12.1 netinstall image to a 64G
> > > SDXC ONN. brand card, makes no attempt to boot plugged into a
> > > bananapi-m5. bring card back to reader, can't mount it, wrong
> > > filesystem for both partitions. Give up, write
> > > Armbian-jammie-full-desktop iso to card, mounts ok, boots
> > > bananapi-m5 normally.
> > >
> > > What did I do wrong?
> >
Fairly straightforwardly: as it stands at the moment, your board is
not supported by mainstream Debian. As outlined on debian-user
* Armbian builds based on board support packages (BSP)
* They add Debian/Ubuntu userland
* You have no idea how they're booting
> > The unfortunate reality is that boot on arm is *still* a mess. The
> > server guys and the windows laptop guys
> > have settled on uefi (though the implementations are often far from
> > perfect), but the hobbyist board segment
> > is still all over the place, with each board (or family of closely
> > related boards) still needing it's own build
> > of u-boot that knows how to initialise the board, load a kernel and
> > initrd and pass them the relavent device
> > tree.
> >
You can probably build u-boot, use debootstrap from one of these
banana-pi 5s running "Debian" but it will mean work and you'll need to
know how big the kernel needs to be / at what offset or similar.
That's the sort of thing that vagrantc has done a lot of in the past.
You're at a disadvantage because none of the rest of us likely have these
boards or will ever see them. That's where having a Beaglebone Black / a
Raspberry Pi really scores.
> > For some boards, Debian offers "concatenatable images", where a
> > board-specific boot section can be concatenated
> > with a board-independent d-i section to produce a boot image suitable
> > for a specific board, yours doesn't seem
> > to be one of them though.
>
There are concatenable images for earlier bananapis - this might be
a good point to start by working out what needs to go into the board
specific part. These images can be dd'ed to an SD card to boot - once
they work.
> All no doubt true. But once this board is booted, its 20% faster than any
> pi, but doesn't have, and I don't need, a wifi radio. And every usb port is
> usb3.
> \
> Thank you Peter Green.
> >
> > .
> >
> > .
>
Some assembly required :) You're an old-school electronics engineer, as
you remind us. It's as if someone says to you "If you can't get the
Einac power tube you need, try this Soviet / E German model. Power output's
the same but the bias may be different. Oh, and it's fatter, so you'll need
a different chimney for the cooling air flow"
That's the scale of the difference between these random ARM SBC's - if
you don't want to change anything and you have all the bits round them,
they're fine. Otherwise, you have to work round your own limitations and
how much effort you want to put in.
All best,
Andy
[And there's some attribution missing above]
> 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, 1940)
> If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
> - Louis D. Brandeis
> Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/>
>
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