On 09/05/2016 12:57 AM, Nick Daly wrote: > Hi folks, > > Recently, I bought an ODroid XU4 to test as a FreedomBox. I was > originally going to buy one of the boards from the Parallela project, > but they seem to have wrapped up. 16 or 128 cores might be the wrong > focus for a personal web-server, anyway. Below are my notes on > testing with the ODroid.
Thanks for the awesome work and this report. > > > 1 Equipment > =========== > > All equipment purchased through ODroid's American distributor, > ameridroid.com: > > - The [ODroid-XU4] seems sturdy and fast. Really nice hardware. > The hardware isn't completely free, as it seems to be in a similar > situation to the Raspberry Pi's proprietary display driver. You > don't need to use the graphics card during normal operation, but I > believe the binary blob does need to be installed to boot the > device. Grumble. It looks like the boot process seems to be like this: SOC ROM -> bl1 -> bl2 -> uboot -> trustzone stuff -> uboot script -> kernel [1][2]. For both XU3 and XU4: - The Debian armmp kernel seems to have support. - The u-boot-exynos package from Debian seems to support XU3 and XU4. - flash-kernel has support for creating u-boot scripts for XU3/XU4 (which are actually generic). It looks like Debian bits are all there and we need bl1, bl2 and trustzone binaries to boot[3]. However, there may be hope for it as the original reference implementation is free software[4]. We can check with #debian-boot folks for more information on how they are using the XU4 support added to u-boot. > > 4 Summary > ========= > > Overall, I'd give this hardware a B. It could be freer and a lot > easier to set up (and would be with a FreedomMaker image), but it > seems quite speedy and powerful for the price. > Given the above boot situation, it should be fairly straight forward to add support for freedom-maker to build XU4 images (except for pulling 3 boot blobs from outside). We can discuss this further if you are interested. Links: 1) http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:exynos4412bootsequence#odroid-x_x2 2) http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:xu3_partition_table#ubuntu_partition_table 3) https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/u-boot.git/tree/doc/README.odroid 4) https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware -- Sunil
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss