Dear Vagrant, Appreciate your response!
On Sun, Apr 30, 2023 at 3:40 PM Vagrant Cascadian <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 2023-04-30, Roger Shimizu wrote: > > I'm trying to support an ARM based RB3 / DB845c [1] dev-board with > > android-style boot image to flash-kernel. > ... > > My question is: > > - Currently flash-kernel is mainly u-boot based, is it proper to add > > "mkbootimg" based devices? > > My main worry here is investing too much in flash-kernel, rather than > replacing it... both require possibly significant effort, and I wonder > if that effort would not be better spent writing a more modular > replacement for flash-kernel? That said, I have not mustered the energy > to do this myself... > > To some degree, I have been the de-facto maintainer for flash-kernel, > but I am hesitant to make significant changes to it... it is not easy > code to read... Yes, I agree that flash-kernel is difficult to understand and maintain. But we have to use it (at least before any alternative appears), and extend it a bit to adapt to our recent needs. > > - Does mkbootimg need to support udeb in order to support D-I for this > > dev-board in the future? > > I *think* that the udeb (indirectly?) calls flash-kernel inside the > chroot... so I am not sure that would be necessary. There's no > "u-boot-tools" udeb, and many boards use mkimage from "u-boot-tools". Thanks for the info! I'll dig it deeper. > > gzip -c9 /boot/vmlinuz-6.1.0-8-arm64 > vmlinuz.gz > > cat vmlinuz.gz /usr/lib/linux-image-6.1.0-8-arm64/qcom/sdm845-db845c.dtb > > > Image > > mkbootimg \ > > --kernel Image \ > > --ramdisk /boot/initrd.img-6.1.0-8-arm64 \ > > --output boot.img \ > > --pagesize "4096" \ > > --base "0x80000000" \ > > --kernel_offset "0x8000" \ > > --ramdisk_offset "0x1000000" \ > > --tags_offset "0x100" \ > > --cmdline "root=PARTLABEL=rootfs console=tty0 > > console=ttyMSM0,115200n8 clk_ignore_unused pd_ignore_unused" > > That seems "simple" enough, given you're using a Debian packaged kernel > and all. Not so different from the mkimage-style support for u-boot. I have some more good news. I found mkbootimg can be replaced by abootimg command, which is already supported by flash-kernel. And I already try to patch flash-kernel to work with the board. The only issue is we need to gzip the debian kernel, which is #831003 [1], and we already have two patches [2][3] for the ticket. I'm not sure which patch do you prefer, since they existed for so long, but still not merged yet. I tried the 2nd patch [3], and found it needs slightly update, otherwise it cannot be used. I posted the update on the MR. My patch already works well with this path. [1] https://bugs.debian.org/831003 [2] https://bugs.debian.org/831003#10 [3] https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/flash-kernel/-/merge_requests/15 If you prefer the 1st patch, which is simpler and straightforward, just let me know, and I can test it and make adaptations if necessary. > It is a frustrating that there are so many ways to boot arm systems... > but that is the reality out there actually implemented in hardware... > > > live well, > vagrant Variety always costs. I just hope that could be limited to an acceptable level. Cheers, Roger
