On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 04:43:44PM +0200, Uwe Kleine-König wrote: > 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 >
Just get _someone_ to make a good quality 64 bit server which doesn't cost the earth and works well with UEFI and relatively standard interfaces and components. AMD were doing this n years ago but the devices never got popular/cheap enough for use. Marvell have the espressobin and macchiatobin - just get something that looks like a performant mini-ATX / itx board and can run forever at low power but in a standard form factor. Andy C.
