network-console on armhf

[Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>]

I'm in the process of adding support for some NAS devices that use
armhf.  They will use network-console for the installation.

I have 2 questions I wanted to discuss:

1) Preseeding the network: on armel, we use oldsys-preseed to read the
existing network configuration file from the firmware to create a
preseed file.  Originally, I thought this was an elegant solution but
over the years I've come to doubt whether this approach makes sense and
think we should just default to DHCP with a fallback IP address.

So imho we have three options:

1) Use oldsys-preseed and add "fake" entries for new devices that will
just default to DHCP (as done for LaCie on armel recently)

2) Add a preseed file to the ramdisk that will do DHCP

3) Do nothing and require users to add a preseed file

I don't like 3) since that would require users to unpack and repack
the ramdisk.

Do you have any preferences?  And is anyone using network-console on
armhf yet? (Just wondering if I can make changes without breaking
things)

2) Kernel/ramdisk and uImages

At the moment, armhf requires users to append the DTB and generate an
uImage.  Obviously, the same approach would work for these NAS devices
but I'd like to make it as easy for users as possible.  So I was
thinking of generating uImage/uInitrd files as part of the d-i
process.  But if I do it for these NAS devices, you could argue we
should do it for all devices and that would be a lot of images.  So,
again, I wanted to hear what people think.

(I should add that for these devices you need a tool that probably
only works on Linux to configure u-boot, so maybe it's not too much to
expect users to generate their own uImage.)

-- 
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/