[fedora-arm] ARM and shipping of various binary firmware / boot bits

Jon Masters jcm at redhat.com
Thu Mar 8 18:12:39 UTC 2012


On 03/08/2012 01:07 PM, Jon Masters wrote:

> Anyway. All this means that on ARM, in some cases (won't be true on
> servers), especially inexpensive dev boards, we become the distributor
> of the U-Boot bits if we want to ship whole SD Card images (which we
> think we do - otherwise installation on Panda or Pi becomes harder, on
> servers and other systems we'll do x86-like Anaconda and PXE later). I
> think we could build U-Boot ourselves, especially in the case of boards
> where we can't brick them just by having a bad build. Generally, I don't
> want to distribute "BIOS" code in the longer term beyond those cases
> where we need to shove something on an SD Card image by nature of the
> way that the cards boot. In other cases, I prefer we don't build or ship
> something, e.g. for U-Boot where it is shipped in flash on the board or
> in cases where we might be able to brick a board.

So I can get behind (reluctantly) us building e.g. a uboot package with
subpackages for e.g. OMAP boards like Panda, Beagle, etc. and then
pulling in the result. Since we're constraining the number of "whole
disk" images we want to make (these are an installation convenience) we
can keep the set of U-Boot bits we actually build fairly small. If
someone has a funky board, then can put this stuff together. Until we
get to the future bigger ARM systems, where this is a non-issue.

Jon.


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