On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 02:03:42PM -0400, Jon Masters wrote: > On 05/06/2016 01:10 PM, Mark Brown wrote: > > On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 12:20:40PM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
> > > But is it really worth trying after so long of the right thing not > > > happening? If anyone really cared about making general purpose distros > > > boot > > > on embedded boards, efforts to compel standards would have happened years > > > ago. To do it right, we would need to have a couple of vendors involved > > > who > > > could compel vendors to comply. > Note: by standards above, I specifically mean "separate platform flash" in > addition to all of the other associated things. Actually, to do it right you Oh, right. In that case this is all irrelevant anyway, there's no need to worry about magic areas of the disk and distros can just do whatever. > > Distros care and currently do ship on such systems - Debian stable lists > > a bunch of boards (something like 20 IIRC) as actively tested for > > example. The board and SoC vendors are to an extent irrelevant here, > I get your point, but for separate flash and getting vendors to ship > firmware, they very much need to be involved. Today, we can't agree as an > industry who is on the hook for this. With an enterprise hat on, I get to Personally I'm not convinced it's particularly worth worrying about - there's enough sensible ways to build systems where the separate storage for bootloaders just isn't solving problems people have that such things are going to be around for a while and inevitably people will end up wanting to run distros on them so at least the community distros need to work with them. > compel vendors to do the only sane thing (in my opinion) which is "thou > shalt ship EFI, on flash that we don't touch". And those who screwed up and > put EFI parameters on hidden disk partitions, or thought EFI variables were > a place to store MAC and platform parameters are slowly found and forced to > comply with the way the industry works. But on embedded, spending a few > cents to do the "right" thing is something that isn't going to happen unless > everyone mandates and pushes for it. It's not just cents, it's also things like board area, manufacturing process, usage models and for some use cases customers who want full control over the software stack. For some kinds of system like the enterprise market what you're describing is absolutely the right way to go but there's other segments where it either isn't solving problems people have or is currently actively worse so there's no compelling reason to adopt. But this is a bit off topic...
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