Re: debian-installer for Odroid-XU4
On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 04:29:26PM -0700, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
>>> I suppose there's no d-i support happening for the XU4 anytime soon? :-)
> I *think* pxe/tftp using distro_bootcmd was working fine from mainline
> u-boot on the Odroid-XU4; if so the netboot images should work ok.
I've seen TFTP work on it, at least. The NIC is really slow to come up for
some reason, but it does connect to my TFTP server and try to fetch files.
> I'm not sure debian-installer can fully support it out of the box, as
> parts of the boot firmware are non-free, as far as I can tell:
>
> https://github.com/hardkernel/u-boot/tree/odroidxu3-v2012.07/sd_fuse/hardkernel_1mb_uboot
Yes, you need some blobs, so a full official Debian release is unlikely to
happen. I believe BL1 is free but must be signed (I'm unsure how this
currently squares with the DFSG), but the TrustZone blob comes without
source, and I believe it is mandatory.
> At best, debian-installer could create images that wouldn't boot until
> users manually install the bl1.bin.hardkernel and tzsw.bin.hardkernel,
> at which point, it is not providing much of an image.
Well, yes and no. I do believe there's value in getting the support 99%
there and leaving it to a third party to create a working image. Optionally,
one could treat /dev/mmcblk0boot0 as just “it's there” (it comes with U-Boot
installed right from the factory) like one does with a BIOS on PCs, and just
install one's own root filesystem. Whether anyone in Debian knowledgeable
in d-i (I worked on it a lot at some stage, but that's ten years ago!) and
the intricacies of ARM cares enough to make that happen is an entirely
different matter, though.
My ideal world, ignoring the issues of realism for a while, would be an SD
card image that I could boot the XU4 from, and that would work largely as a
d-i boot CD. Of course, there would be the additional challenge in that there
might be no eMMC on the device and that the SD card thus also be the
destination media, but I suppose that could be solved either by unpacking
everything to a RAM disk and running from there, or shipping it as a “nearly
installed” system that'd boot up into essentially the second stage of d-i.
(That would of course make partitioning fixed, but, yes.)
/* Steinar */
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Homepage: https://www.sesse.net/
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