Public bug reported:
Hi,
there's currently an evolving and growing landscape of little, low-
power, ARM-based computers. There's the Raspberry Pi, which can't run
Ubuntu because of it's non-supported CPU revision, but there's other
computers able and mostly used to run Ubuntu, namely the odroids, the
cubieboard, the banana pi.
Unfortunately, running Ubuntu on them is a mess.
Although Ubuntu provides an almost complete and suitable package
repository, there's two major problems:
- lack of kernels
- lack of boot/install images and boot code
It's rather disappointing if you have to wait for someone around the
manufacturer updating a kernel every now and then.
I'd therefore propose to offer some support and to make this part of Ubuntu.
Kernels:
- Let those people who create the home-brewn and nobody-knows-how
kernels provide a simple description about how to compile the kernel
suitable for their platform, and have the kernels built automatically.
- Same with boot images: usually these images are copied with dd onto an sd
card and then do autoexpand to the size of the card after first boot. However,
these images do slightly differ in boot code and boot details, and, of course,
in the kernel used.
It would not be hard to have these images created automatically, since
most of it is done by debootstrap and does not really differ from how
Ubuntu's boot cd images are made. It's more or less just the details of
booting and the choice of kernel, that make a difference.
Would be really nice to offer something like a HowTo for hardware providers on
how to create packages fitting into the ubuntu environment, and how to inject
these packages into the ubuntu tree (or to offer a ppa for every platform).
Ubuntu is pretty good, but running it on ARM hardware is sort of
headache if you want to do it well. It's, btw., a security problem if
you have to use kernels and images taken somewhere from the wilderness
of the internet and getting kernel updates only occassianonally and not
automatically.
I'm pretty sure these little computers will become more and more
important in futures, and there's already millions out there.
regards
Hadmut
** Affects: ubuntu
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1366304
Title:
Missing support for ARM architecture (kernels and images)
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