On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 11:53 PM, Paul Wise <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 10:24 AM, Paul Wise wrote: > > > What should Debian's strategy/policy wrt platform firmware be? > > If there is anyone interested in this topic who is also going to > DebConf14, please register a BoF on the topic. I would suggest making > it architecture neutral since there will probably be people interested > in coreboot on x86 there (myself included). I won't register such a > BoF myself (but would probably attend), I don't have enough broad > experience with multiple device classes, only with a couple of > smartphones (gta02, galaxysmtd). > > Thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts, I agree with much of > what has been said. What I'm getting here is that what to do with > platform firmware is very user, device and architecture dependent and > requires lots of testing and detailed knowledge. > > The question now is, what changes should we make to various bootloader > packages and to the Debian installer. Probably the best place to start > that discussion and work on it is at the BoF I suggested above. > > -- > bye, > pabs > > http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact > [email protected] > Archive: > https://lists.debian.org/CAKTje6F4mCSYgZFZdYnbOH9YziZ2ptRGV4=hfokzdqaiq_n...@mail.gmail.com > > I haven't done much embedded linux in a while, but one thing that might be useful for this kind of situation would be to come up with a standardized version of u-boot or some other kind of boot-loader that could be used by the device firmware. This way, the final boot loader is more consistent. This approach also might help deal with situations where the amount of storage on the device used for storing the kernel image gets too small for newer kernels and can't be resized. This problem was encountered on Zaurus devices a couple of years back and we managed to use a minimal kernel with kexecboot as a second stage bootloader to boot from removable storage.
Just a few things to keep in mind :) -- Henry von Tresckow (hvontres)
