[Arm-dev] Enterprise distros and the two faces of 'reliability'

[Gordan Bobic]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2018, 23:10 Fred Gleason, <fredg at paravelsystems.com> wrote:

>  none of the current crop of embedded boards seem to support any of those
> standards.
>

There may be a half way solution you can leverage, at least on some devices
- the ones supported by mainline u-boot.

These days u-boot can present EFI compliant environment, or at least enough
to satisfy grub-efi. I have this running in DreamPlugs.

Secondary benefit is that you can build a reasonably vanilla multi-SoC
kernel and have that booting from grub without having to prepare it for
u-boot.

It makes it a lot easier to support multiple devices with a single kernel
(just avoid a distro Frankenstein kernel and stick with vanilla mainline).

And once you have the kernel sorted out correctly, the user space will
"just work".

Whether this is because of laziness, ignorance or the need to hit a
> particular (often very low) price point I am not in a position to determine.
>

It's lazyness, ignorance, and inertia of historical utterly inconsiderate
contempt and unaccountability of SoC manufacturers producing
un-mainlineable kernel and boot loader/firmware bodges to get their SoC
working without any intent to ever maintain them.

The only sane thing to do is to only ever consider hardware that is well
supported by mainline kernels and bootloaders for any project. Custom
bodged kernels and bootloaders just aren't worth the effort. If a hardware
manufacturer doesn't think it's worth their time to support open standards,
it most certainly shouldn't be worth yours. It took me a few years to
finally accept that.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/arm-dev/attachments/20181026/b9f1380a/attachment-0001.html>