Re: odroid hc1 on debian?

[u-boot and uefi and grub]

it seems to me there is an overlap in the functionality each implements.

[u-root]

That addresses a somewhat different field and is still based on
a (stripped-down) UEFI implementation.

It was presented in that context, but can be used elsewhere too. I mean I never understood the small-initrd madness (or was spoiled enough to have at least 1GB of ram in every machine I handled), thus I build my initramfs with full glibc&bash&friends, and didn't even cut away /usr/share/doc, as it didn't hurt enough to matter. The only downside was waiting a few seconds during pxe boot to get a few hundred MB transferred over the network.

So when I stumbled into the initrd yesterday, trying to figure out why my work-in-progress didn't boot, I was reminded again of this extra and very different userland, and I would absolutely not mind getting rid of it. But again, I might be spoiled by having had machines with too much ram :)

It takes care of creating a proper boot environment (e.g. updating
boot scripts, wrapping the kernel and the initrd into uImages on
platforms where that is required, writing the kernel to NOR flash
on platforms where that is necessary, etc.) on kernel installation
and upgrades.

thanks, will investigate it further.

> DONE: it contains a odroid-xu4 entry, that would work on the hc1 too.

Vagrant mentioned that there seem to be differences between the XU4
and the HC1 and that a separate HC1 device-tree has been submitted
for kernel 4.15. If that new devicetree gets used, a corresponding
entry in the flash kernel machine database will become necessary.

The info I got was: the boards are the same for u-boot and kernel. but different in hardware: gpu connector etc. dropped, but usb2sata bridge and usb2ethernet chips are integrated. These changes don't need a new kernel, as detecting devices hard wired to the usb3 ports of the chips should be fine.

The debian-installer team maintains this.

For the source code and build system, please refer to
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/CheckOut

ok, thanks. Lets see if d-i team would be willing to create a broken image in the sense that it contains all the open source code, but doesn't boot.

That would be still a great improvement, as then users need to "only" flash these cpu vendor blobs into the sd card - much less work compared to creating the sdcard from scratch.

Thanks, Andreas