Bug#781999: Please install device-tree blobs in /boot
Package: linux
Severity: wishlist
Hey,
The ARM linux image packages install DTB files in /usr/lib/<kernel version>/,
as a DTB is required to boot most modern arm systems typically the right file
has to be copied to a bootloader accessible filesystem before usage (e.g.
/boot). On current Debian systems this tends to be done by flash-kernel.
This ofcourse works fine for device-specific images, however for generic ARM
images that's pretty nasty.
I've recently started using the newish u-boot generic distro support on my
boards[0], which among other things allows one to simply specify a directory
containing the DTB files and u-boot will pick the right one based on the board
it's booting on.. Allowing generic images to be booted on boards where u-boot
is in e.g. flash. Ofcourse, this means all potentially used dtb files should be
on a boot-loader accessible partition, not just one specific board.
As such the request to install dtb files in /boot, which also follows the
convention in the upstream build system.
For reference when using linux-image-3.19.0-trunk-armmp this would add ~8 mbyte
of dtb files to /boot, current linux-next's multi_v7 configuration generates
around ~11 mbyte of dtb files.
0: http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot.git;a=blob_plain;f=doc/README.distro;hb=HEAD
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.0
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (101, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386, armhf, armel
Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
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