Thank you Karsten. It answers a lot of questions and it makes sense. I think we can say the very same about the odroid, it has some non free things too.
So it looks like we still don't have a 100% open source computer. On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 23:07 +0100, Karsten Merker wrote: > On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 05:54:47PM -0300, Reg Lnx wrote: > > > Some distros have official support to several ARM development boards. > > ArchLinux - http://archlinuxarm.org/ > > Fedora Project - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM > > OpenSUSE - http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Supported_ARM_boards > > > > Those distros do officially support several Open Source ARM development > > boards, such as Raspberry Pi, PandaBoard, BeagleBoard and Odroid U/X > > series. > > > > I'd like to know if Debian community have plans to officially support > > any of those development boards, providing ready to boot images, > > containing the Debian Installer for example. > > > > I am a owner of a Raspberry Pi Model B rev 1 and an Odroid u3. > > To get Debian on these board I have to relay on the Raspbian Community > > work (And they have done a wonderful work) and on generously built > > images for the Odroid hardware. > > > > Debian is my OS of choice and it would be wonderful if I could use it on > > all my devices and get packages and updates from Debian. > > As far as I can tell there will probably never be direct support for > the Raspberry Pi in Debian (in contrast to Raspbian) for mainly two > reasons. One is the CPU instruction set architecture on the Pi, which > uses an ARMv6 CPU while the minimum requirement for the Debian armhf > port is an ARMv7 CPU, so the Debian armhf packages cannot run on the > Pi's CPU. > > Using the Debian armel (soft-float) port on the Pi would be technically > possible CPU-wise, but as armel targets CPUs way older than the one in > the Pi and does not use the CPU's floating point unit, it would be very > slow for many applications, so it does not really make sense to do it. > > Raspbian is a very fine distribution for the Pi and as far as I know, > it provides nearly all Packages which are available in Debian armhf, > but built for the Pi's CPU. > > Another problem is the firmware issue on the Pi. Booting the Pi > requires a set of non-free firmware files to be present on the boot > device. Due to them being non-free, those cannot be part of Debian > main, so they cannot be included in the official Debian installer > images which contain only free software. > > I have no personal experience with the other ARM boards you have > mentioned, so I would just like to point out a few general issues. > Many arm boards do not work with the official "mainline" Linux kernel, > but instead need specific kernels from the board vendor or they need > patches to the mainline kernel which are incompatible with support for > other boards. For Debian it is not feasible to support lots of > different kernel source trees for different boards, so one requirement > for support in Debian is that the board can run a kernel built from the > mainline kernel source. Similar requirements exist for the bootloader > used to boot the board (often u-boot). Due to lack of experience with > the boards you have mentioned, I cannot tell whether these requirements > are fulfilled for those boards. > > I hope that at least partially answers your question. > > Regards, > Karsten -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-arm-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/1393458416.25060.2.camel@MacBookPro
