On Thu, 2014-03-20 at 19:30 +0000, Tixy wrote: > On Thu, 2014-03-20 at 08:38 +0000, Ian Campbell wrote: > > On Wed, 2014-03-19 at 20:33 +0100, Karsten Merker wrote: > > > Another system question - the d-i alpha 1 announcement states: > > > > > > > Hardware support changes > > > > ======================== > > > > [snip] > > > > * armhf: The armmp flavour has been added; it covers both mx5 and > > > > vexpress. > > > > > > Because of this I was going to list the versatile express as > > > supported platform in the installation guide, but I have stumbled > > > over the fact that it is not listed in the flash-kernel machine > > > database, which makes me wonder about its status. Can anybody > > > shed some light on this? > > > > AFAIU vexpress does not boot via u-boot and has it's own "special" > > firmware. Therefore I don't think flash-kernel support is > > possible/needed. > > On booting vexpress... > > There is an upstream U-Boot for vexpress when its fitted with an A9x4 > CoreTile (pluggable CPU module) and various out-of-tree hacks for other > CoreTiles, but it's best to consider vexpress as 'special' as the vendor > (ARM Ltd) supplies it's own simple custom bootloader with the board and > is promoting UEFI as a the boot-loader of the future. Basically, there > are many constantly evolving variables of possible firmware version and > configurations its best not to try and support any particular one.
Also I suspect most vexpress systems are actually QEMU's emulation, which appears to support direct boot only, i.e. the files must be installed on the host. > However, having the kernel, initrd and dtbs available in an easily > discoverable place in the generated Debian filesystem would be good. For > Linaro file system images (based on Open Embedded, Ubuntu and Android) > we try and put the initrd, zImage and dtbs in the boot partition, so at > least it's fairly simple to point whatever bootloader the user uses at > the right bits, or can find them to put into flash memory or wherever > else they need to go. Kernels and initramfses will be in /boot, as for most Linux distributions. However, we currently install DTBs in /usr/lib/<package-name>. Maybe it would be helpful to copy the latest applicable DTB into /boot, on some machines. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings One of the nice things about standards is that there are so many of them.
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