Hello, On Thu, 13 Jul 2023 21:27:09 +0200 Emanuele Rocca <e...@debian.org> wrote:
> On 2023-07-01 04:18, Roman Mamedov wrote: > > There are 42 DTBs shipped with the installer for Allwinner alone: > > https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm64/daily/device-tree/allwinner/ > > > > But for the bootloader aka firmware aka u-boot: > > https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm64/daily/netboot/SD-card-images/ > > it is an extremely weird and arbitrary list of 12 random boards. For > > instance > > supporting "Orange Pi Zero Plus2" of all things specifically, not even just > > "Zero Plus"; and not, say, Orange Pi Prime or Orange Pi Win (and so on). > > The choice of 12 boards does indeed look a little puzzling. Having no > historical background on this, I can try and guess that they were added > on a case-by-case basis every time someone needed to boot the installer > on their system. Out of interest: do you have a board that's not among > the lucky 12? :-) Yes, as a weird coincidence with my initial message, I have an Orange Pi Prime and Orange Pi Win. :) > > So despite having all the other DTBs, the system is not installable on those > > boards. Unless the user is sent to find and compile their own u-boot, but if > > so, what is the purpose of randomly providing it for 12 random niche boards > > to > > begin with, might as well make everyone do that. > > > > Instead, I suggest a better solution: maybe not even daily, but at least > > once > > per month, could you build a bootloader part for ALL the supported boards, > > and > > not just a handful of them. > > In an ideal world we would have just one single image that works on all > systems! That's one of the ideas behind the Arm SystemReady > certification program at least: making sure that the board can boot a > regular, unmodified distro ISO without any additional blobs. > > We don't live in such a world unfortunately, at least not yet and not > for all boards. I'm not sure we should have one different image for each > DTB honestly. I'd rather go for having no custom images at all, but a > very simple procedure to build your own image for your board. Maybe in > the form of documentation, or a script, or both. There isn't really an image per board, but at least a clever system of concatenating a board-specific bootloader and a board-agnostic rest of the image. That looks reasonable enough, and I suppose building the current 12 bootloaders is automated. Maybe add all 42 to that automation for now? -- With respect, Roman
