[Arm-dev] Lessons learned on state of uboot while working on F21

Mon Sep 8 12:14:13 UTC 2014
Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com>

I have been kind of active on F21 testing on my Cubieboards, and have 
learned a number of unsettling facts.  Basically, for the Allwinner SOC, 
uboot is missing a lot and it probably will not be until spring that key 
components will work.  Most noteably video!

Now I am running Redsleeve successfully on my Cubieboards, and to do 
that I used the uboot from the Fedora 19 remix which uses the old 
Allwinner 'special' SunXi 3.4 kernel which has video support, but lacks 
things like support for the Cubietruck WiFi.  See 
http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort for uboot status.

There is a flurry of updates on the uboot list, the target for a major 
code freeze for upstream is in October, but I don't recognize many 
Allwinner updates (lots of Freescale posts).  But on the Fedora-arm list 
it was made clear that F21 will be lacking a lot of functionality for 
Allwinner boards; good enough for servers, but not workstations.  And it 
will be F22 to target what was not included.

I am seriously considering alternative boards like the Wandboard, but it 
costs more, and my CFO (wife) was really complaining about how much 
money I recently spent on hardware (even with a 15 month ROI).  So for 
now I am staying with the Cubies.

So on to any possible testing.  Karanbir stated in an earlier post to 
use a F19 build as the basis for a Centos7 build.  That would mean the 
older Sunxi 3.4; which works.  But no updates.  Not the newer 3.16.

To see what I did for RSEL see:

http://cdn.opensxce.org/redsleeve/el6/cubieboard2/

I have to update the README with some caveats I have learned while 
working with RSEL (like selinux not working, and you have to install 
cronie as it is not part of the minimal image).

I am interested in contributing, but...  Travel and Holidays over the 
next month.  And most of my Cubies are now in production.