Hi Mark,
On 05/06/2016 01:10 PM, Mark Brown wrote:
On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 12:20:40PM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
But is it really worth trying after so long of the right thing not happening? If anyone really cared about making general purpose distros boot on embedded boards, efforts to compel standards would have happened years ago. To do it right, we would need to have a couple of vendors involved who could compel vendors to comply.
Note: by standards above, I specifically mean "separate platform flash" in addition to all of the other associated things. Actually, to do it right you need two separate platform flash modules - one with EFI, the other with parameters (such as MAC addresses, and the like). Today, we're very lucky if there's even one flash chip on the board to house firmware (where it belongs) rather than on an SD card, etc.
What will happen next ;) is that someone will say "in your opinion, Jon". We can't generally agree that it's "wrong" to build systems without flash on the board to house the firmware. So getting others to agree to do it is going to be probably never achievable.
Distros care and currently do ship on such systems - Debian stable lists a bunch of boards (something like 20 IIRC) as actively tested for example. The board and SoC vendors are to an extent irrelevant here,
I get your point, but for separate flash and getting vendors to ship firmware, they very much need to be involved. Today, we can't agree as an industry who is on the hook for this. With an enterprise hat on, I get to compel vendors to do the only sane thing (in my opinion) which is "thou shalt ship EFI, on flash that we don't touch". And those who screwed up and put EFI parameters on hidden disk partitions, or thought EFI variables were a place to store MAC and platform parameters are slowly found and forced to comply with the way the industry works. But on embedded, spending a few cents to do the "right" thing is something that isn't going to happen unless everyone mandates and pushes for it.
Jon.