Re: On ARM64 Bit. A Qualcomm Chip.

2022-10-01 Thread Gunnar Wolf
Hello Dan,

Dan Zulla dijo [Sat, Oct 01, 2022 at 11:35:23AM +0200]:
>Dear Debian Friends,
> 
>I have reached out to a member of the @debian.org community who was
>displayed on the website as a skilled engineer for the Installer, yet he
>advised me to go on the mailing list,  So I am.
> 
>I acquired a rather cheap laptop, a Samsung Galaxy Go with LTE, and that
>was about 300$. It is a nice piece of hardware, and anyone should be able
>to work on ARM64 with that price point and that comfort. I am well aware
>performance of the chip is mediocre, and compiling Debian is going to take
>a while.

FWIW, my main laptop for the last year has been a Lenovo Yoga C630,
which is also an ARM64 system. Let me tell you that I'm more than
happy with it, although I am more than aware it will never be a
fast compiling beast. And mine has an earlier CPU than yours! You will
find it to be quite snappy for non-intensive use.

I hope, though, you got the 5G version, as 8GB RAM is quite a
difference over 4GB RAM.

> (...)
>Are you available to be motivated .. to potentially advise? The Bootloader
>works. As soon as you try to run the installer, textual or graphical,
>crash. Not a commented crash. Just a total nuke of the CPU and reboot. Or
>just uncommented fail to switch into graphical model. (We should work on
>that, if that is the case.)

I cannot provide much help in this regard, but I can point you to a
group of people who most probably will. There is a group for
supporting ARM64 laptops under different Linux distributions at:

https://github.com/aarch64-laptops/

Particularly, they have a slightly modified Debian installer available
at:

https://github.com/aarch64-laptops/debian-cdimage

It is, yes, mostly geared at the Lenovo offerings. But it's a step in
the right position!

You can also join via IRC, at #aarch64-laptops in OFTC
(irc.debian.org).

>Do you have any insight or experience, or idea, about why Grub works?
>Ubuntu image boot displays something about being unable to establish
>graphics output mode, low-level wise. I am a high level programmer getting
>started low-level. I don’t know what that means. The display driver?

Well, I'd venture that Grub works because it is not Linux! It is a
completely independent, much easier system, and works by using UEFI as
its operating-system-of-sorts (which is provided by the
firmware). Linux wants to control hardware much more closely than
Grub.



On ARM64 Bit. A Qualcomm Chip.

2022-10-01 Thread Dan Zulla
Dear Debian Friends, I have reached out to a member of the @debian.org community who was displayed on the website as a skilled engineer for the Installer, yet he advised me to go on the mailing list,  So I am. I acquired a rather cheap laptop, a Samsung Galaxy Go with LTE, and that was about 300$. It is a nice piece of hardware, and anyone should be able to work on ARM64 with that price point and that comfort. I am well aware performance of the chip is mediocre, and compiling Debian is going to take a while. Nonetheless, desktop users, and developers, should have a different experience than I had. Windows 11 is somewhat useless for development (There is a Visual Studio Preview, there is LLVM-mingw with aarch64 even) but Linux Subsystem for Windows doesn’t work, and I didn’t manage to quite compile a hello world from ARM64 assembly thus far. I am using Rufus to make a bootable USB, and was planning to hack myself forward to testing the CPU in real mode. (Don’t know if it is called Real mode in ARM). The architecture of the Chip is called Kyro 468. It is called semi-custom ARM CPU by Qualcomm, and knowing Snapdragon from phones, this may be a hard one. Are you available to be motivated .. to potentially advise? The Bootloader works. As soon as you try to run the installer, textual or graphical, crash. Not a commented crash. Just a total nuke of the CPU and reboot. Or just uncommented fail to switch into graphical model. (We should work on that, if that is the case.) But the installer menu, from a users perspective – Grub – works, and that is a lot for me. How did you compile it? Do you have a suggestion for a build system, and can you point me to the minimal installer source code and how you achieved this? Do I have to use the LLVM toolchain on a AMD64 server, or mingw, to compile Debian Installer / Linux kernel accordingly, or do I need to rent/buy a Ampere ARM64 server, ... – Do you have any insight or experience, or idea, about why Grub works? Ubuntu image boot displays something about being unable to establish graphics output mode, low-level wise. I am a high level programmer getting started low-level. I don’t know what that means. The display driver? Best,Dan