On Fri, Oct 07, 2016 at 02:48:30PM +0200, Jean-Christian de Rivaz wrote:
On some system, maybe. Not on the Orange Pi Plus
Well I guess it is one of the exceptions.
Well, I understand the technical part. But from a user point, when he see
the Orange Pi Plus in the board list of the Debian installer, I think it's
normal that he expect to be able to install a working system like the Debian
installer do for a PC.
The problem with arm systems with u-boot is that you are dealing with
embedded systems, not standard machines. They have options for how to
boot (on some systems u-boot needs a recompile depending on if you boot
from eMMC or SD, so that's a pain).
Given debian for armhf can run on just about any modern arm system,
the only bit it doesn't cover is installing the boot loader since
that is board specific (and sometimes board configuration specific).
Having a wiki or other document listing what else needs to be done for
a given system would be handy (and probably exists for at least some of
the systems).
You mean the flash-kernel package and not by the flash-kernel-installer ?
flash-kernel takes care of the kernel and the boot script. It doesn't
install u-boot. At least not at this time.
Yes, but only at the installer time on that board. As soon as you reboot it
without the SD card or without FEL OTG injection of u-boot, you are left
with a useless board.
Well it is still fixable with a tiny bit of one time work.
I must admit that for various arm boards I have played with I have never
used the installer. I have used debootstrap to create a rootfs and then
put it and the required bits on uSD or eMMC or wherever I wanted it.
Some of the boards have needed a custom kernel build of course, although
some didn't.
Agree, but again take the point of view of a user that simply want to
install Debian on the Orange Pi Plus. By fare, the simplest way is to write
a SD card image of the Debian installer into a SD card and insert it into
the board slot. It could be netboot, or hd.media with an additional
partition for the ISO image. Both will work to install Debian on the eMMC.
Any others way require more work. Anyway, actually either methods will let
the user with a useless board.
Well the simplest would be to just dump a premade image on uSD and leave
it there and forget eMMC. Of course eMMC often has better performance
than uSD and it is nice to have a method for file transfers (although
USB keys and ethernet are often more convinient).