Hello,next week there is a (virtual) meeting at ARM who invited some people involved in Linux on ARM CPUs. One of the topics there is to tell them Debian's needs and pain points.
My current list (based on own experience and asking for feedback in #debian-arm) currently has:
- Fragmentation
- Vendor kernels vs. mainline
This got better in the past is my subjective impression, but it
still hurts. Device tree made this a tad simpler, but it's not
unusual to have vendor specific bindings.
- early boot code
U-Boot (or general: bootloader) is device specific and more often
than not there is only a Vendor variant available.
Also today there are more relevant components: ATF, UEFI/EDK2
Vendors care at different intensities (and profit from external
developers) Would Arm Base System Architecture (BSA) help? (This is
only for AArch64 though, arm32 still relevant for us.)
- relevant SoC/SBC vendors:
- Allwinner
- Broadcom / RaspberryPi Foundation
- Marvell
- NXP
- Odroid
- Rockchip
- some more for sure (which?)
- Graphics
Similar problematic, vendor blobs vs. OSS
Is there anything on your mind that is missing above and that you'd like
to be shared with ARM? Feel free to reply here or discuss in
#debian-arm. (I'm ukleinek there.)
Best regards Uwe
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