On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 10:40 AM, Steve McIntyre wrote: > It's possible to replace the installed U-Boot > on many boards, but that depends on hardware support being properly > upstreamed; lack of that upstreaming work is another common bugbear in > vendor U-Boot binaries. If you want to use your arm64 machine as a > *computer*, my recommended route is UEFI; this is why all the server > vendors have gone that route.
Doesn't the same problem of u-boot upstreaming also apply to UEFI/TianoCore upstreaming (but worse)? AFAICT we do not have *any* support in our edk2 source package for anything other than virtual machines (x86/ARMv7/ARMv8). It seems to me that u-boot is in a much better position wrt upstream support for ARM *and* for support for UEFI than TianoCore or other options that aren't in Debian like coreboot. > Hector asked about the current state of the less well-known Arm ports: > big-endian versions and arm64ilp32. Lots of different BE ports have > happened over the years, for various reasons. arm64ilp32 [8] is the > arm64 equivalent of x32 on x64-64; IMHO there is no need for it in > Debian as a mainstream port. Wookey is working on it in Linaro at the > moment. There is a BE version too. While x32 *might* have some > performance wins over i386 (depending on code), it's not clear that > arm64ilp32 is likely to be any better than armhf (A32) in most cases. Wookey, could you add something about the motivation for arm64ilp32 to the wiki page about it? > Last question: what should people do to keep armel? Main things: > > * deal with armel-specific bug reports For some reason there isn't an armel usertag but there is an eabi one: https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?tag=eabi&user=debian-arm%40lists.debian.org > * get involved in toolchains and make sure they continue to work Join the #debian-toolchain IRC channel and tell doko you are there to support armel. Also: Test that d-i and other installation methods work. Test that u-boot works for armel devices: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=u-boot Fix the issues mentioned on the buildd page: https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=armel&suite=sid Improve the release team's arch qualification status for armel: https://release.debian.org/testing/arch_qualify.html Monitor the rebootstrap for armel and fix any issues that come up, join #debian-bootstrap and mention your interest to helmut. https://wiki.debian.org/HelmutGrohne/rebootstrap Package and test the RPi open firmware: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware Improve the wiki page for armel, move it under the Ports hierarchy and base it off the port template: https://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort https://wiki.debian.org/Ports https://wiki.debian.org/PortTemplate Improve the web page for the ARM ports. https://www.debian.org/ports/arm/ Extend architecture support for some services: https://ci.debian.net/status/ https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/reproducible.html http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-live-builds/ -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
