Hi, El Tue, Dec 01, 2015 at 09:20:36AM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd escribio: > Ian Campbell wrote: > >On Mon, 2015-11-30 at 14:03 +0100, Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote: > >>W dniu 30.11.2015 o 13:52, Mark Morgan Lloyd pisze: > >>>I've been playing with Debian for the RPi2 (not the original RPi) from > >>>http://sjoerd.luon.net/posts/2015/02/debian-jessie-on-rpi2/ and find > >>>that it fairly readily accepts standard packages- XFCE, KDE and so on. > >>> > >>>However it still relies on a mix of standard and non-standard > >>>repositories and packages, can anybody comment to whether a forthcoming > >>>mainstream Debian will support this platform out of the box? > >>Probably when r/pi2 will be supported by mainline kernel. Up to this > >>moment you have to use "non-standard repositories and packages" to get > >>kernel/bootloader to get board booting into standard Debian userspace. > > > >What's the status of the r/pi2 bootloader? Is it the same[0] binary > >blob (presumably non-free) in an VFAT partition on the SDCARD stuff as > >required on r/pi1? > > Yes, mounted on /boot/firmware > > He explains: "This is because the VideoCore expects the first partition to > be a FAT filesystem, but mounting FAT on /boot really doesn't work right on > Debian systems as it contains files managed by dpkg (e.g. the kernel > package) which requires a POSIX compatible filesystem." > > >[0] nb: Everything I know of r/pi* here is based on rumour and > >hearsay... > > In which case as a bit more detail: there are basically two processors on an > RPi, the semi-documented "VideoCore" reads files from a FAT filesystem into > memory and then starts Linux. It works fairly well, but does mean that it's > not possible to install something like U-Boot or OpenFirmware to take > control immediately after a reset, there's an inescapable lower-level > loader.
Note that currently it *is* possible to use u-boot in the R-Pi, see: http://elinux.org/RPi_U-Boot With respect to mainline kernel support, this page shows a pretty good picture: http://elinux.org/RPi_Upstreaming Many of the drivers are already upstreamed or queued for 4.4.
