Re: Changing flash-kernel behaviour (Was: Support for sunxi-based ARM systems in d-i)
On Thu, May 01, 2014 at 04:28:55PM +0200, Karsten Merker wrote:
> Do all platforms flash-kernel cares for have their boot scripts
> on a filesystem that supports symlinks? I know too little about
> the various ARM systems in this regard, but if there are systems
> among them that for example boot from a FAT partition, this would
> mean they would no longer be able to boot. From looking at
> bootscr.omap in the flash kernel sources I would assume that this
> is at least the case for the Pandaboard.
A lot of them use a vfat partition, so symlinks are not an option.
> That would indeed be nice, but it would come with a price. Would
> we be willing to drop support for an existing (although not
> officially Debian-supported) platform to achieve this? Copying
> instead of symlinking could of course be an alternative option -
> not particularly elegant but not dependent on filesystem
> features.
>
> > BTW, the u-boot guys seem to want to converg on using either the
> > extlinux config file format or the BootloaderSpec[0] as the standard
> > mechanism for configuring which kernel to use. THe former would probably
> > be easier to support (since we could just refactor update-extlinux out
> > of the existing x86 only package).
>
> > [0] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/
>
> Hm, this spec mandates that the /boot partiton must be FAT.
> When looking at the discussion about Raspbian using FAT on /boot
> I doubt that Debian would implement that spec.
I sure hope not. That's a terrible spec. Many systems already use
symlinks in /boot and you can't just arbitrarily decide that isn't
allowed. Why not just declare /boot/loader should be on FAT, but leave
/boot out of it.
--
Len Sorensen
Reply to: