[Freedombox-discuss] Testing ODroid-XU4 Notes
On 09/05/2016 12:57 AM, Nick Daly wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Recently, I bought an ODroid XU4 to test as a FreedomBox. I was
> originally going to buy one of the boards from the Parallela project,
> but they seem to have wrapped up. 16 or 128 cores might be the wrong
> focus for a personal web-server, anyway. Below are my notes on
> testing with the ODroid.
Thanks for the awesome work and this report.
>
>
> 1 Equipment
> ===========
>
> All equipment purchased through ODroid's American distributor,
> ameridroid.com:
>
> - The [ODroid-XU4] seems sturdy and fast. Really nice hardware.
> The hardware isn't completely free, as it seems to be in a similar
> situation to the Raspberry Pi's proprietary display driver. You
> don't need to use the graphics card during normal operation, but I
> believe the binary blob does need to be installed to boot the
> device. Grumble.
It looks like the boot process seems to be like this: SOC ROM -> bl1 ->
bl2 -> uboot -> trustzone stuff -> uboot script -> kernel [1][2].
For both XU3 and XU4:
- The Debian armmp kernel seems to have support.
- The u-boot-exynos package from Debian seems to support XU3 and XU4.
- flash-kernel has support for creating u-boot scripts for XU3/XU4
(which are actually generic).
It looks like Debian bits are all there and we need bl1, bl2 and
trustzone binaries to boot[3]. However, there may be hope for it as the
original reference implementation is free software[4]. We can check
with #debian-boot folks for more information on how they are using the
XU4 support added to u-boot.
>
> 4 Summary
> =========
>
> Overall, I'd give this hardware a B. It could be freer and a lot
> easier to set up (and would be with a FreedomMaker image), but it
> seems quite speedy and powerful for the price.
>
Given the above boot situation, it should be fairly straight forward to
add support for freedom-maker to build XU4 images (except for pulling 3
boot blobs from outside). We can discuss this further if you are
interested.
Links:
1)
http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:exynos4412bootsequence#odroid-x_x2
2)
http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:xu3_partition_table#ubuntu_partition_table
3)
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/u-boot.git/tree/doc/README.odroid
4) https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware
--
Sunil
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