Hello Roman, On 2023-07-01 04:18, Roman Mamedov wrote: > There are 42 DTBs shipped with the installer for Allwinner alone: > https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm64/daily/device-tree/allwinner/ > > But for the bootloader aka firmware aka u-boot: > https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm64/daily/netboot/SD-card-images/ > it is an extremely weird and arbitrary list of 12 random boards. For instance > supporting "Orange Pi Zero Plus2" of all things specifically, not even just > "Zero Plus"; and not, say, Orange Pi Prime or Orange Pi Win (and so on).
The choice of 12 boards does indeed look a little puzzling. Having no historical background on this, I can try and guess that they were added on a case-by-case basis every time someone needed to boot the installer on their system. Out of interest: do you have a board that's not among the lucky 12? :-) > So despite having all the other DTBs, the system is not installable on those > boards. Unless the user is sent to find and compile their own u-boot, but if > so, what is the purpose of randomly providing it for 12 random niche boards to > begin with, might as well make everyone do that. > > Instead, I suggest a better solution: maybe not even daily, but at least once > per month, could you build a bootloader part for ALL the supported boards, and > not just a handful of them. In an ideal world we would have just one single image that works on all systems! That's one of the ideas behind the Arm SystemReady certification program at least: making sure that the board can boot a regular, unmodified distro ISO without any additional blobs. We don't live in such a world unfortunately, at least not yet and not for all boards. I'm not sure we should have one different image for each DTB honestly. I'd rather go for having no custom images at all, but a very simple procedure to build your own image for your board. Maybe in the form of documentation, or a script, or both. Emanuele
