I also have an Acer Chromebook that's aarch64, bought because it was Arm to replace the Pinebook. Chromebooks are weird but it does a little Debian Bullseye running under Chrome OS. It runs for days on a battery charge, quite fun compared to the usual Intel/AMD power hungry beasts.
On Mon, Mar 20, 2023 at 11:21 PM Paul Wise <p...@debian.org> wrote: > On Tue, 2023-03-21 at 00:34 +0100, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: > > > Would an ARM-based machine be a good freedom-respecting computer to > > run Debian on? I read the Raptor/Power guys saying modern ARM has > > freedom problems in a, but I haven't seen them go into specifics. > > It depends on what you mean by freedom-respecting. All of the major > ARM SoC vendors now have libre GPU drivers (inc IMGTEC). There may be > various minor drivers that aren't free though depending on devices. > For example sometimes GPS on smartphones uses a proprietary daemon. > > Firmware on the other hand is a different matter and quite varied. > > For example, the RPi devices start the VideoCore GPU first, proprietary > firmware then starts the ARM cores, then starts the ARM boot process. > The LibreRPi folks are reverse engineering this firmware and maybe also > the other cores on the SoC, which are all different ISAs. In addition > there is some DRM but that turns out to be easily bypassed. > > https://github.com/librerpi/lk-overlay/ > > https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware/blob/master/docs/cracking-rpi4-hmac.txt > > On lots of other devices (esp SBCs), the ARM core starts first and its > bootrom loads libre bootloaders like u-boot, which load Linux. > > On other devices, especially laptops, use UEFI, which is usually a > vendor fork of TianoCore EDK2, possibly not published. There are some > devices that can run mainline libre edk2+edk2-platforms, but the latter > is not available in Debian yet so you would need to package it. > > https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/ > > Outside boot firmware, most firmware will be proprietary on ARM, just > as it is on x86 or any other platform except the ones where there have > been intensive reverse engineering efforts like RaptorCS POWER devices. > > On mobile devices, look at PinePhone, Librem 5 or MNT Pocket Reform, > other devices have less mainline Linux support or worse freedom issues. > > https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile > > On laptops, probably the Apple ARM devices are the fastest, but > mainline Linux isn't yet suitable but is gaining ground quickly. > I think there might be some blobs during the boot or something and > the different page size for Apple ARM devices might be a challenge. > Otherwise Lenovo and other vendors have some ARM laptops. Or > there is the PineBook or MNT Reform for more esoteric devices. > > https://asahilinux.org/ > > Not sure about ARM desktops. ARM servers seem problematic, IIRC the > arm64 ones Debian uses for buildds are unstable and the potential > replacements are way too expensive. Not sure of the status here. > > > Will popular Debian software "generally work" > > There aren't many open bugs tagged as affecting ARM ports and most of > them look like build related failures rather than not working. Probably > folks don't bother to usertag their ARM-only bug reports though. > > > https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=debian-arm%40lists.debian.org > https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Debbugs/ArchitectureTags > > There are of course various build/test issues on ARM ports too. > > https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=arm64 > https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ftbfs.cgi?arch=arm64 > https://ci.debian.net/status/failing/?arch[]=arm64 > > > I don't particularly want to get deep into being a porter > > Personally I think users of every non-amd64 port should consider doing > porting work to keep their ports viable, since your personal package > set might not be on the radar of vendors like ARM or other users. > > In case you do, we now have a document about the different ways to > contribute to creating new ports (it applies to existing ports too). > Some of the steps may be missing for existing ports, for example all > of the ARM ports are missing a page based on the status template. > > https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New > https://wiki.debian.org/PortTemplate > > -- > bye, > pabs > > https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise > -- ------------- Education is contagious.
