On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 04:29:26PM -0700, Vagrant Cascadian wrote: >>> I suppose there's no d-i support happening for the XU4 anytime soon? :-) > I *think* pxe/tftp using distro_bootcmd was working fine from mainline > u-boot on the Odroid-XU4; if so the netboot images should work ok.
I've seen TFTP work on it, at least. The NIC is really slow to come up for some reason, but it does connect to my TFTP server and try to fetch files. > I'm not sure debian-installer can fully support it out of the box, as > parts of the boot firmware are non-free, as far as I can tell: > > > https://github.com/hardkernel/u-boot/tree/odroidxu3-v2012.07/sd_fuse/hardkernel_1mb_uboot Yes, you need some blobs, so a full official Debian release is unlikely to happen. I believe BL1 is free but must be signed (I'm unsure how this currently squares with the DFSG), but the TrustZone blob comes without source, and I believe it is mandatory. > At best, debian-installer could create images that wouldn't boot until > users manually install the bl1.bin.hardkernel and tzsw.bin.hardkernel, > at which point, it is not providing much of an image. Well, yes and no. I do believe there's value in getting the support 99% there and leaving it to a third party to create a working image. Optionally, one could treat /dev/mmcblk0boot0 as just “it's there” (it comes with U-Boot installed right from the factory) like one does with a BIOS on PCs, and just install one's own root filesystem. Whether anyone in Debian knowledgeable in d-i (I worked on it a lot at some stage, but that's ten years ago!) and the intricacies of ARM cares enough to make that happen is an entirely different matter, though. My ideal world, ignoring the issues of realism for a while, would be an SD card image that I could boot the XU4 from, and that would work largely as a d-i boot CD. Of course, there would be the additional challenge in that there might be no eMMC on the device and that the SD card thus also be the destination media, but I suppose that could be solved either by unpacking everything to a RAM disk and running from there, or shipping it as a “nearly installed” system that'd boot up into essentially the second stage of d-i. (That would of course make partitioning fixed, but, yes.) /* Steinar */ -- Homepage: https://www.sesse.net/
