On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 10:50 AM, Alexander Graf agraf@suse.de wrote:
On 12.09.14 17:45, Rob Herring wrote:
On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 10:18 AM, Alexander Graf agraf@suse.de wrote:
On 12.09.14 17:05, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
On Fri, 12 Sep 2014 17:11:30 +0300 Riku Voipio riku.voipio@linaro.org wrote:
Hi,
I've just invited a bunch of attendees at linaro connect for cross-distribution meeting in the next connect. Sadly it's not officially on the scheduled talks, so there is no remote participation this time. However you still have a change to reply here and add items to our agenda :)
Draft agenda:
- Review status of various distributions ARMv7 and ARMv8 support
- Discuss boot environment standardization (U-Boot/UEFI/GRUB..)
- uEnv.txt
armv7 should all be standardising on extlinux.conf u-boot is rapidly adopting it as the standard way for distros to boot, and have a stable know interface between the distro and u-boot
I'm personally not quite as passionate here. My main concern is that I want things to be consistent across the board at least inside of openSUSE.
But the problem is vendors need clear instructions for how to configure their u-boot correctly for distros. Having per distro instructions is not going to work as they will ignore the distros they don't care about at the time. They may not care about any distro either, so we have to make it trivial to enable or default.
I agree.
There are platforms out there that simply load a boot.scr from SD card, so that's a mechanism I have to support anyway.
That said, I wouldn't mind to provide another u-boot binary for that particular platform, boot into it and then have that one check for an extlinux.conf.
There's probably 2 categories here:
- No extlinux support -> needs a new u-boot build
- extlinux support, but not the right env or boot scripts -> use
boot.scr/uEnv.txt to fixup the environment.
Sounds reasonable. But keep in mind that there will be quite a significant transitioning phase.
Also, I think for AArch64 we're pretty much set on EFI by now I think.
For servers yes, but for other things not so much. I'm working on a aarch64 chip with u-boot right now. How much the distros care about non-server focused boards varies.
But whatever happens, it really has to be consistent across the board, and preferably still work with older downstream u-boot forks.
- legacy platforms
- Installers vs pre-built images
we should eb using installers where ever possible.
Why? For most use cases the image based approach is nicer.
People are going to want both. Are there different issues around standardization for images?
I think standardization of images is a lot easier, because you don't have to put board specific knowledge into the (generic) installer.
IMHO for 32bit most of this is a lost cause - things are over and done. For AArch64 we'll get EFI and everything I've tested there so far works impressively well.
Again, depends on the market. There's some silly people that think we'll still have 32-bit systems in 2038. ;)
Rob