Bug#883580: debian-installer: arm64: please ship dtb files
Hello All,
On Tue, Dec 05, 2017 at 10:47:12PM +0100, Karsten Merker wrote:
> > Please don't ship dtb files at all, including the kernel images.
...
> it appears to me that this argument assumes a situation that we
> simply don't have for many devices. A lot of the ARM-based
> devices that Debian supports don't come with any preinstalled
> firmware at all. Many of them don't even have permanent onboard
> storage (such as an SPI NOR flash) in which such a firmware could
> be stored, so the firmware is commonly a user-supplied u-boot
> image on an SD card.
>
> In practice, for most of the devices supported by Debian/armhf,
> the canonical source for the devicetree _is_ the Linux kernel.
> The SoC-manufacturers commonly ship years-old, often
> pre-devicetree android kernels and stone-aged hacked-up u-boot
> versions without any notion of device-tree for their hardware and
> don't really care about mainline Linux. ...
+1
And additionally fiddling with devicetree should be encouraged IMHO as
it allows to do unusual things with those SoC boards, eg. sharing
an IR RX with an UART TX - how should the vendor decide in such cases ?
Also look at the ACPI situation - even main Server vendors firmware
contains bugs not fixed during the livetime of the systems.
So please let the linux kernel tree be the device-tree reference.
Thanks for all the work on device-tree,
greetings
Hermann
--
Netzwerkadministration/Zentrale Dienste, Interdiziplinaeres
Zentrum fuer wissenschaftliches Rechnen der Universitaet Heidelberg
IWR; INF 205; 69120 Heidelberg; Tel: (06221)54-14405 Fax: -14427
Email: Hermann.Lauer@iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
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