Re: State of ARM port

[Leif Lindholm]

Hi Andrei,

Sorry, have been off on holiday.

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:43:54AM +0300, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
> It seems that distributions tend to focus on native U-Boot support for
> extlinux-like configuration and direct loading of Linux kernel/FDT.
> Recently it came up for openSUSE, reasons were named

Debian don't, and I'm not sure I've heard of any others moving that
direction, so I don't know if it can be called a trend.

> 1. upstream U-Boot prefers extlinux for loading, CONFIG_API is
> considered edge case, deprecated. They do not consider GRUB valid reason
> to maintain it :)

Do you have any references to this?
(Not questioning it, sounds likely, but would like to read through
any existing discussions.)

> 2. GRUB requires patching for each board to set valid link address

Yeah :(

> 3. some general issues on specific boards

Hmm?

> 1 requires active commitment from U-Boot community, apparently it is
> lacking. To properly fix 2 we need relocation support in U-Boot; which
> again returns us to "GRUB not being interesting to U-Boot community" :)

No, 2 would be totally fixable in GRUB. It would just take someone
actually making the grub kernel position independent. And I haven't
managed to find the time in the past two years...

> 3 depends on motivation to debug and fix issues; as long as GRUB is not
> considered there is none.
> 
> So what should we do with this port?

Unsure.

I have had people start asking me for the arm64 variant, but if the
U-Boot community is actively disintirested in providing an API to hook
into, this may not make sense.

Regards,

Leif