Re: Areas of Emdebian to integrate into Debian
On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 9:33 AM, David Goodenough
<david.goodenough@btconnect.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 03 April 2011, Hector Oron wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> 2011/4/3 David Goodenough <david.goodenough@btconnect.com>:
>> > The big difficulty with this is going to be getting all the fixes that
>> > are necessary into the kernels. Given that normal Debian kernels would
>> > not need the fixes what is their incentive to accept them.
>> >
>> > Just look at
>> >
>> > the enormous list of patches that OpenWRT applies to the kernels, many
>> > of which are for SoC peripherals (and this applies to MIPS SoCs as well
>> > as ARM ones). Yes these fixes should be in the kernel, but they are not
>> > and without them the kernels are no use for boards like Micro
>> > Routerboards and Ubiquity Routerstations (to take but two I have tried).
>>
>> If someone steps up to apply *and maintain* OpenWRT or other patchsets
>> against linux-2.6 Debian package. I do not see objection to support
>> that package in Emdebian and have packages available at Emdebian
>> repositories. Trying to minimize the work, we could focus on long term
>> and embedded suitable tagged kernels.
>>
>> The above would imply to add support into flash-kernel as well for
>> infield upgrades.
>>
>> Cheers,
> The problem is that without these patches, Debian in any form can not support
> these devices because the regular kernel is insufficient.
I agree, debian/emdebian doesn't need to support kernels for all
boards. The kernel configurations, patches & loading (i.e. saving and
setting u-boot correctly) are very specific to the board.
The one thing that I always worry about though is changes in the
kernel API and how the emdebian userspace programs use it. Normally it
would just be new features that are unimplemented in the userspace
program. The one example here is because of the socket-can driver a
bunch of configuration options have been added to the ip utility. This
isn't a big deal, as all the old functionality of ip still works the
same way with newer kernels. Has it ever happened that a new kernel
API breaks something in debian/emdebian? Is this even a worry?
thanks,
Paul
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