Re: What to do with d-i on armel?
On Sun, Jan 7, 2024, at 23:07, Bastian Blank wrote:
> Hi
>
> With Linux 6.6 we dropped the Marvell specific kernel image, as it
> was not known to work on any of the available devices. We still have
> another armel kernel left, the one of the Raspberry Pi 0 and 1, which
> uses an ARMv6 CPU.
>
> This also removed all the udebs from armel, which makes many d-i
> components not longer have fullfiled dependencies and the release stuff
> of course acting up.
>
> Do we have any armel subarch that can be installed via d-i?
A few ideas from the kernel's point of view:
The most important ARMv5 platform is now probably at91, as
Microchip still releases new sam9 chips[1] and is going to
keep supporting it for a while.
I would guess that the latest ones are not even that far off
the performance of the kirkwood/mv78xx0 or bcm2835 parts,
but I don't have numbers.
Qemu versatilepb is probably the most accessible arm926
platform, though there are a couple of other armv5/v6 (ast2400,
ast2500, pxa27x, raspi1ap) in qemu that one should be able
to get to work as well if anyone found the time.
Since armel userland should work fine with any armhf or
arm64 kernel, it might still be useful to repackage
one or both of those for the armel archive and use this
to have an installation method for armel on modern
hardware. [Side note: I would also like to see an arm64
kernel image added to armhf, it's probably more useful
than the armmp-lpae kernel in terms of enabling users.]
At the moment, it is possible to enable support for
arm1176 (as in bcm2835) in a normal armhf kernel and
have that boot on armv6k, armv7 and armv8 hardware.
I actually want to change that in the kernel though:
Now that we dropped SMP support in armv6, as it now
makes more sense to have armv6k grouped with armv5
and instead have a generic kernel for armel that
works on bcm2835, versatilepb, at91, kirkwood and
all the others that one might use.
Arnd
[1] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/sam9x75
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