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Re: Updating the installation guide, arm platform support



On Thu, 2014-03-20 at 19:30 +0000, Tixy wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-03-20 at 08:38 +0000, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-03-19 at 20:33 +0100, Karsten Merker wrote:
> > > Another system question - the d-i alpha 1 announcement states:
> > > 
> > > > Hardware support changes
> > > > ========================
> > > > [snip]
> > > > * armhf: The armmp flavour has been added; it covers both mx5 and
> > > >   vexpress.
> > > 
> > > Because of this I was going to list the versatile express as
> > > supported platform in the installation guide, but I have stumbled
> > > over the fact that it is not listed in the flash-kernel machine
> > > database, which makes me wonder about its status. Can anybody
> > > shed some light on this?
> > 
> > AFAIU vexpress does not boot via u-boot and has it's own "special"
> > firmware. Therefore I don't think flash-kernel support is
> > possible/needed.
> 
> On booting vexpress...
> 
> There is an upstream U-Boot for vexpress when its fitted with an A9x4
> CoreTile (pluggable CPU module) and various out-of-tree hacks for other
> CoreTiles, but it's best to consider vexpress as 'special' as the vendor
> (ARM Ltd) supplies it's own simple custom bootloader with the board and
> is promoting UEFI as a the boot-loader of the future. Basically, there
> are many constantly evolving variables of possible firmware version and
> configurations its best not to try and support any particular one.

Also I suspect most vexpress systems are actually QEMU's emulation,
which appears to support direct boot only, i.e. the files must be
installed on the host.

> However, having the kernel, initrd and dtbs available in an easily
> discoverable place in the generated Debian filesystem would be good. For
> Linaro file system images (based on Open Embedded, Ubuntu and Android)
> we try and put the initrd, zImage and dtbs in the boot partition, so at
> least it's fairly simple to point whatever bootloader the user uses at
> the right bits, or can find them to put into flash memory or wherever
> else they need to go.

Kernels and initramfses will be in /boot, as for most Linux
distributions.  However, we currently install DTBs in
/usr/lib/<package-name>.  Maybe it would be helpful to copy the latest
applicable DTB into /boot, on some machines.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
One of the nice things about standards is that there are so many of them.

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