[linux-sunxi] Re: [U-Boot] Announcing easy Linux installation on Allwinner devices for non-geek users
On 01/22/2015 08:20 AM, Hans de Goede wrote: Hi Siarhei, See the bottom for my reply to all this. On 22-01-15 13:49, Siarhei Siamashka wrote: Hello, This is a somewhat long e-mail. Thanks for reading and reaching the end of this e-mail. Special thanks to Luc Verhaegen, Roman Byshko and Hans de Goede for their work on u-boot. You're welcome, and thank you too for all your work on sunxi support, especially the sun4i/sun5i/sun7i dram work. So about the above mail, I've a number of things to say: 1) I think presenting the user with a list of devices to choose is a good idea, but I also think your solution is over complicated. The user will likely use a PC to download and write the image to the sdcard, why not simply provide a simple app on the PC side to select the board and write the correct u-boot binary ? I had a little bash script doing just that for the Fedora images, granted this requires the user to have Linux, so maybe we need someone to get to write a win32 util for this, so that we can offer both options ? To me this seems much more simple, and it will e.g. also work for a23 / a33 based tablets, which do not have hdmi and are really attractive for little hobby projects due to their low price (35-40 usd for a complete tablet). I should have waited for your reply, Hans. You see the issues much clearer than I. Yes, I *like* how I build an SD card for Fedora. I had sent in the little change to add the Cubieboard2 to the fedora-arm list some time ago. I might think this script could be dynamically created by set of files. But it does not help for new boards? What is currrently in Fedora assumes that everything for each board is worked out, and the uboot is provided. Siarhei is proposing a, perhaps complex, method of 1st boot building the right uboot for the board. So the SD card is built through the initial download and script (running xzcat plus whatever) with a general uboot, and then 1st boot customizes the uboot to that board? I would still want my serial console access to this process. At first I really complained about needing a serial console; it was taking me back to my UNIX days in the early '90s! Perhaps I would have to pull that Xyplex serial terminal server out of my junk bin to get multiple systems supported! but after I REALLY costed things out, I am a fan of the serial console for servers. A friend has a wandboard (Freescale SOC) and that has a real DB9 for the console, so he needs a DB9 serial/USB adapter. I would not be supprised of some Allwinner boards have gone to this expense. 3) As for the whole store info in nand based on sid idea, with the recent readonly nand patches posted to the list, which AFAIK do not need any nand parameters, we could do one better and read the dram timings from the nand for the SPL, and the in real u-boot read and parse script.bin from the nanda partition. This is a bit of a wild idea I admit, but it could work, I would want an installer to move as much as possible of the OS to the NAND and eliminate the need of the SD after 1st boot! Also make it easy to partition a HDD/SSD for swap and /home and whatever else (disk druid here we come?) Starting out on an SD card is good, but a serious desktop will have a serious drive. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups linux-sunxi group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to linux-sunxi+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[linux-sunxi] Re: [U-Boot] Announcing easy Linux installation on Allwinner devices for non-geek users
On 01/22/2015 07:49 AM, Siarhei Siamashka wrote: Hello, This is a somewhat long e-mail. Yes it is. Thank you for this detailed introduction to the problem and solutions. As a semi-skilled user and proponent of armv7, I really welcome all the work you and others have done. Just wish it was done 6 months ago! :) 2. A possible solution = == 2. A possible solution = For example, the UART serial console is not really used by BROM, and this was a kind of hack in the previous demo. At that time it looked like the serial console could be configured correctly according to some heuristic rules. However later it turned out that the heuristics does not really work on some A13 devices and they may have mutually incompatible UART configurations: ... Anyway, the really missing part was the user friendly output and user friendly input for generic u-boot binaries. HDMI is widely used in Allwinner hardware and it supports autoconfiguration. USB host ports use dedicated pins and only enabling/disabling power can be device specific. The missing USB power can be solved by using a powered USB hub, which is not very convenient, but still a workable solution. ... It is a demo of a universal SD card image, which should be bootable on any Allwinner A10/A10s/A20 device. With an installer of u-boot v2015.01-rc3 as the initial demo simple payload. By using a HDMI monitor for output and a USB keyboard or FEL button for input, it offers a menu based user interface. The menu allows to select the exact type of the user's Allwinner device and install the right bootloader for it. This is all great with one possible exception: server setups with no monitor/kybd. Take a look at: http://medon.htt-consult.com/~rgm/cubieboard/ You will see 5 cubieboard2 + drives in a nice tower arrangement. These are powered by one Anker 40W 5-port USB power supply. Note that every board has a 'dedicated' UART/USB serial console. These are $2 each compared to the cost of HDMI cables and an HDMI KVM switch (cheapest 4 porter I have found is $100; no cheap 8 porter). All I need to do is connect my USB extension cable to one, connect to a notebook and run 'screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200' and I have the console for booting/configs. So I would want the option of a serial console menu. I suspect that screen supports VT-100 style menu controls, just have not had a situation to tried it. I am excited about the prospect that installing your Linux distro of choice on your Allwinner board of choice for a desktop system will soon be achievable. In May I will be visiting my parents for their 70th wedding anniversary, and would love to set them up with a system on their TV. But please consider the server use and the serial console. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups linux-sunxi group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to linux-sunxi+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [linux-sunxi] Re: [U-Boot] Announcing easy Linux installation on Allwinner devices for non-geek users
On 22 January 2015 at 14:20, Hans de Goede hdego...@redhat.com wrote: Hi Siarhei, See the bottom for my reply to all this. On 22-01-15 13:49, Siarhei Siamashka wrote: This universal u-boot would be awesome and it looks like it's getting close enough. You're welcome, and thank you too for all your work on sunxi support, especially the sun4i/sun5i/sun7i dram work. So about the above mail, I've a number of things to say: 1) I think presenting the user with a list of devices to choose is a good idea, but I also think your solution is over complicated. The user will likely use a PC to download and write the image to the sdcard, why not simply provide a simple app on the PC side to select the board and write the correct u-boot binary ? I had a little bash script doing just that for the Fedora images, granted this requires the user to have Linux, so maybe we need someone to get to write a win32 util for this, so that we can offer both options ? A bash script should presumably work on any unix so long as the only operation needed is to copy/symlink a dtb or script.bin It requires separate FAT partition for kernel. I am not sure all distro tools handle installing kernel to FAT flawlessly but I think it's sometimes used on EFI as well. To me this seems much more simple, and it will e.g. also work for a23 / a33 based tablets, which do not have hdmi and are really attractive for little hobby projects due to their low price (35-40 usd for a complete tablet). ok, if you want me to write a windows app for this I can probably do that. I think there was severe limitation with VB dialog capabilities but you can always write a GTK app and then just compile it for Windows or something. You probably would not want something like copying whole pygtk runtime to the boot partition just to show a menu so either using windows-native scripting or C is probably preferred. 2) I would love to see a good fex file parser both the generate u-boot defconfig files and kernel dts files That would certainly help, especially with those tablets where the serial pins are dangling or connected to some random unpowered piece of hardware like the camera and u-boot gets stuck because there is noise on the console and it interprets it as the user interrupting the automatic boot sequence. 3) As for the whole store info in nand based on sid idea, with the recent readonly nand patches posted to the list, which AFAIK do not need any nand parameters, we could do one better and read the dram timings from the nand for the SPL, and the in real u-boot read and parse script.bin from the nanda partition. This is a bit of a wild idea I admit, but it could work, 2 problems with it are: a) It assume a standard Allwinner android nand contents, so not good for devices where people want to actually write a normal linux distro to the nand / bricked devices It does not have to. The memory parameters are in the boot area AFAIK which should be same on AW formatted flash and mainline formatted flash because the BROM reads the bootloader from there. It will have to distinguish AW boot0 and u-boot SPL, though. b) Does not work on devices without nand (e.g. some olinuxino-lime models) You always can (and should) write the parameters on the card. Reading nand is just one way of detecting them. c) Does not really help for the kernel, we could generate a dtb on the fly on u-boot based on the fex file contents, but that is going to be very tricky, esp with the dtb files evolving as we start supporting more and more hw features in the upstream kernel. The problem with generating the dtb or even just using existing fex with linux-sunxi is that some default values which can be omitted in manufacturer fex have to be specified in linux-sunxi fex or dtb. For one, tablet keys default to on when there is no section for them and I had to explicitly enable them on my tablets. Thanks Michal -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups linux-sunxi group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to linux-sunxi+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
