<timokau[m]>
makefu: Damn that's a high quality wiki page, nice
<clever>
makefu: i got a banana pi r1 a while back, intending to turn it into a nixos router, but ive had trouble even getting uboot to run predictable
<timokau[m]>
rock64 was also my first choice, but I worry that the "no fuss" / "plain nixpkgs" part is an issue there
<clever>
the bpi1 also lacks pci and such, and has a blob rom for booting
<clever>
allwinner based
<timokau[m]>
(also its a bit annoying to order from germany, but that's secondary)
<makefu>
samueldr: this talk finished, was it worth it? also was it recorded?
<samueldr>
I wouldn't know
<samueldr>
being in canada
<samueldr>
not at fosdem
<samueldr>
I'm hoping it was
<samueldr>
or that the repo will hold the relevant info
<makefu>
yeah
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<makefu>
i think this stuff they try to acchieve is super tricky and there are just too many weird setups with different dram chips and whatnot and simply not enough space in this part of the bootloader
<samueldr>
no idea what the presentation was about exactly
<samueldr>
still exciting to think about in some ways
<makefu>
true, i think you can get an image for a couple of different recent arm boards but surely not `all` or even `most` of them
<samueldr>
when the only difference between two boards of the same mfg and same family is the ram and training data, this might be good
<samueldr>
so instead of "all", maybe at least "all rockchip pine64 boards"
<makefu>
yeah something like this
<makefu>
from the description: "It uses the different start sector used by the SoC families, with some tweaks to allow coexistence between the different firmware components, plus some runtime detection of the SoC and DRAM chips used."
<samueldr>
it would make it more worthwhile to pre-bake images with the bootloaders
<makefu>
i think so as well
<makefu>
disk space got cheap enough to pre-build all of these
<samueldr>
oh, hadn't read the description carefully
<samueldr>
I'm also excited in some manner for allwinner, e.g. all A64 or all R18 (maybe combined?) could almost be intercompatible
<samueldr>
the other day I accidentally had the A64-LTS u-boot running on an orange pi device
<makefu>
:D
<samueldr>
seems they're just similar enough to at least boot to serial
<samueldr>
if a family of hardware like this can have a good enough lowest common denominator, and the booted os do the hard work or using the right device tree (since it'll be close to impossible to embed them all?) it could be good
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<makefu>
yeah, there is at least some potential to get stuff working on more than one device
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<samueldr>
oh. looks like there was a somewhat related talk last year
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<samueldr>
at a glance, our images aren't that far from the 2018 talk, except that instead of (like upstream u-boot does, and we do) u-boot dealing with picking the right dtb, the SPL would deal with picking the right dtb; and the talk recommends UEFI instead of the generic distro thing
<samueldr>
(and also assumes that the device trees are stable, and not part of the kernel builds, but instead an updated thing in the firmware)
<makefu>
"... like real computers!" is a great name for this topic
<samueldr>
the main thing that looks snazzy in the talk from last year is that by using a tool, they switch the name in the SPL, thus the firmware now supports another board
<makefu>
that is quite cool
<samueldr>
nice, the demo at the end is basically how my pine64 a64-lts is setup
<samueldr>
(booting a UEFI usb drive)
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<makefu>
ha! neat
<makefu>
booting into a system on an usb-stick (or disk) is also somewhat preferable. sdcards are not that awesome for anything besides mp3 and photos
<samueldr>
the cool thing is when the SBC has an eMMC
<samueldr>
you can easily install another distro to it using usb boot... like a real computer!
<makefu>
:D
<samueldr>
but that setup assumes the firmware is not on any of the storage
<samueldr>
well, mass storage
<samueldr>
or else, like my orange pi [watchamacallit] that have eMMC, but no SPI
<makefu>
this is why we cannot have nice things!
<samueldr>
when installing from usb to eMMC you have to take care not to overwrite the firmware parts, or take care to re-install it
<samueldr>
from a cursory glance, the amount of boards with a usable SPI flash is small, and with BOTH eMMC and SPI flash is smaller still :(
<samueldr>
it looks like the cheaper boards will do an either, either an SPI flash, or an eMMC on board
<makefu>
i have a board with emmc only here, and i have the same problem that is the need to keep all the holy partitions in tact
<samueldr>
imagine, installing to eMMC, not only erasing the sectors, but not giving it space
<samueldr>
the horror!
<makefu>
i somewhat can grok now why there are so many storage chips are around in your ordinary laptop now. all these issues were solve by mainboard manufacturers long ago already. however i really really like the idea that you can provide your own uboot for all these devices - like coreboot, but the default
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