El Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 08:54:20PM +0200, Christian Kellermann deia:
- Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net [160822 20:49]:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 7:26 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
I found this message...
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-08/msg00048.html
cooool! they're interested in porting libreboot to the A20.
That would not make much sense would it? Apart from the U-Boot stuff to setup the A20, what good is a BIOS replacement on ARM machines?
I asked the same in coreboot list years ago when they started to port coreboot to ARM. I hardly remember but the point might have been to enable UEFI (both for functionality and possibly peripheral initialisation), or take other coreboot payloads, like SO verification and so on. There is coreboot for several ARM processors, in most if not all ARM chromebooks, at least the tegra K1 and rockchip 3268).
But what I understood from the message you link is that libreboot is a distribution of coreboot (which cleans out the proprietary parts, etc. because it has other goals, but also adds some tested configurations and build infraestructure for the toolchain, coreboot, payloads, etc.). But they are considering in the future to be a distribution of coreboot _and u-boot_. I don't understand they want to port coreboot to the A20, but to include u-boot (for the A-20 or more generally?) into libreboot. See if payloads can be reused for u-boot, or at least if the build infraestructure and documentation can include it.
The goal of libreboot is distributing firmware for as many computers as possible that allows to use as much of them as possible with 100% free software. Usually ARM hardware is not too usable with 100% free software (except OMAP, freescale, and maybe some others) so u-boot was not too useful for the computers they support until now. Leah just knew of an ARM computer that might work with 100% free software and just thought her goal is more easy to achieve incorporating u-boot than porting coreboot to the A-20 and then updating the coreboot version in libreboot to get that support.
There might be the idea to port SeaBIOS to ARM. I can't outright dismiss it, but I can't think right now of what advantages it would have. The point is supporting legacy interfaces (to be able to boot from a CD, or paint to the screen or read from the keyboard form an OS without an specific driver for the GPU or KBD...) But any legacy code still calling BIOS would be x86, I guess. So once the BIOS is ported you would have to port the BIOS client applications or OSes.