[Arm-netbook] Rebuilding official OS images?

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

---
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 8:47 PM, Elena ``of Valhalla''
<elena.valhalla at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2016-07-29 at 12:03:58 -0500, Matt Campbell wrote:
>> Are there scripts somewhere for building the official OS images for the A20
>> card, from official distro package repositories, using debootstrap or the
>> equivalent tool for other distros?
>
> Debian has support for a number of A20 boards in the official
> installer:
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Allwinner
>
> the EOMA68 board is still not supported, but if a device tree blob is
> available it is possible to use it with a bit of manual work

 thanks for mentioning this, elena.   wookey asked me abouuut.... 18
months ago.  the issue is not that it's impossible to make one: i use
the cubieboard2 one with very little modification and i belieeeve i
dropped a copy of it here:
 http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner/a20/boot/

 just updated that to add the 4.7 kernel config and devicetree

 so that's not a problem... the devicetree exists to get booting....
the issue is that the *linux kernel doesn't support what's needed*.

 and what's needed is described here:

http://elinux.org/Device_tree_future
https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/11/10/593

once that's become mainline, and is proven and is fully supported by
both the linux kernel *AND U-BOOT*, *then* and *only* then can we
submit a device-tree *SERIES* of entries for the linux kernel (and
u-boot).

the problem is basically that we have absolutely no idea what hardware
the EOMA68 computer cards find themselves in.... until they have read
the EOMA68 I2C EEPROM at address 0x51 and obtained the "chassis
identification type".

 the hardware side is documented (sparsely) in the EOMA68 specification:
   http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/EOMA-68#Requirements_for_I2C

the software side has a lot that still needs to be done.

l.