[fedora-arm] Black Bootable image

[Peter Robinson]

On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Steve Underwood <steveu at coppice.org> wrote:
> On 12/22/2013 08:59 PM, Adrian wrote:
>>
>> I see vfat images dated this month, however still indicating the serial
>> console requirement.
>>
>> When will we get to a bootable image, with usb/hdmi support please?
>>
>> Adrian ... vk4tux
>>
>>
> This month's VFAT image for the Beaglebone Black is badly broken. If you
> want something workable use an older
> image.Fedora-Minimal-VFAT-armhfp-20-1-sda.raw.xz
> <http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/Linux/Fedora/releases/20/Images/armhfp/Fedora-Minimal-VFAT-armhfp-20-1-sda.raw.xz>
> contains a kernel which keep oops'ing on certain operations, like an
> outbound slogin attempt. I reported that and the response was kernel RPM
> 3.12.5-302 which results in a board which will not boot at all.

What do you mean by "this months image". The release image does have
some known and documented limitations but it's relatively stable for
the documented use case.

> It looks like kernel-3.12.5-302 fixes various things for x86_64 machines, so
> it is an improvement for them, yet it really wrecks an ARM installation. I
> guess we can expect ARM to always be a secondary architecture, with anything
> that benefits x86_64 users being pushed, regardless of its effects on other
> users.

That's not exactly true. Firstly whether it be x86 or ARM no one
particularly device blocks a kernel release. If there's an issue with
a particular piece of HW it's then fixed in a later release. In the
case of the BB Black the 3.12.x kernel massively improves a number of
things such as usb, hdmi and other things. There was one known
regression which is the ethernet, which while it works isn't the most
stable. I've today pushed a patch that should fix this for the next
kernel build and I've put up a scratch kernel [1] for those that wish
to try it while we wait for the Fedora kernel devs to push a new
kernel.

We the Fedora ARM kernel people and wider testers are doing our best
with limited time and many devices to support with a greatly moving
target that is the upstream kernel. We do our best but there's many
combinations of hardware which people use in many different ways and
we do try our hardest to support all the many different ways and means
that people want to use Fedora on ARM.

Peter

[1] http://pbrobinson.fedorapeople.org/arm-kernel/kernel-devel-3.12.6-300.fc20.armv7hl.rpm