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.
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, when people do this they often don't use any of the software the board vendors provide and just use things like upstream u-boot. Coming up with something that covers all the cases with minimal code for the distros will make life easier for them, if board vendors want to pick it up as well in what they're shipping (and ideally in how they spec their media usage) that's great but we're already winning even if all the board vendors totally ignore it.