Drop 32bit and require SPI boot flash.

Development on core packages and the distribution goes on in here.

Drop 32bit and require SPI boot flash.

Postby adam900710 » Wed Jan 25, 2023 11:06 am

Hi,

I totally understand the workload to maintain a rolling distro is huge, especially for less common hardware.

Thus there is some ideas to reduce the workload:

- Drop all 32bit arch
AKA, no armv6/v7 support.
This may sound too aggressive, but trust me, those SoCs are really too slow for most modern works.
Just imagine try compile a distro kernel using RPI2.

And with less archs to support, we can focus on perfecting aarch64 support.

- Require the boards to have a dedicated boot flash (normally a SPI flash), except RPI
This is to reduce the requirement on compiling U-boot.
A lot of RK3399 boards are already having such SPI flash, like RockPro64, while newer
RK3588 boards all have SPI boot flash (some even has a full working EFI env).
And this would align us to x86_64, and let U-boot to be part of firmware.

This not only makes new boards support easier (only need to bother kernel), and in fact it's
going to be the only way.
For cases the vendor U-boot is not good enough, we can compile our own and provide it as
precompiled image, with docs on how to flash them.

And more and more SoCs has closed source ATF, making it much harder to package a working
U-boot.

The exception for RPI is for its popularity, but I really don't believe the boot sequence is RPI is
any good.

Considering ArchlinuxARM is really the core of a lot of downstream distos (Manjaro ARM, Void Linux ARM), and
a lot of people may even have their day job depending on an ARM machine (3 aarch64 hosts running VMs for my daily fs tests),
I really hope ArchlinuxARM to be better and better.
adam900710
 
Posts: 44
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2012 1:27 pm

Re: Drop 32bit and require SPI boot flash.

Postby m040601 » Fri Jan 27, 2023 12:15 am

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')his may sound too aggressive,


Yes, it is too aggressive. There has already been a huge loss with the dropping of support for armv6 (raspberry pi zero etc). You should go revisit the discussions about it. And pay more attention to the complaints and losses of other users.


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'b')ut trust me, those SoCs are really too slow for most modern works.



Sorry, no. I don't trust you. I'm one of those running all sorts of "modern works" or armv7. File servers, git servers, http servers, media servers, music databases and players. Web browsing and lite desktops etc.

And using and learning the "old fashioned" small classic electronics and GPIO functinalities.

You know, all boring old stuff.

Nothing of "cool new stuff" ,like artificial vision this, gpu accelerated that, crypto xyz, mining foo, bloated GUI app bar, wastefull of cpu/ram web browser app xyz.

So because it is "boring", nobody brags, blog posts or makes comments on the forum. That doesnt mean this type of user doesn exist.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'J')ust imagine try compile a distro kernel using RPI2.


Do we all, users of Archlinuxarm, have to be "kernel compilers" now? Can't some of us just, like, ... I dont know ... use the provided default kernel and be 100% satisfied with it ?



Many of the tools I mention above dont even have "official" Archlinuxarm packages. So I have to use AUR Pkgbuilds. It will take much longer than on an x86 system. It might take a little bit longer than on aarch64. But the end result is the same. The tool runs and get its job done I dont notice any substancial and relevant "speed" difference to an aarc64 platform.

Oohh ... And I can keep the perfectly usable hardware that I gave money for. I also dont need to pollute the environment. With this crazy and irrational buy-and-throw-away-2-years-later cycle of the Arm platform.

Just because your "old smartphone" is "deprecated". Or your 2 year arm development board isnt "powerfull enough" anymore.
m040601
 
Posts: 28
Joined: Tue Jan 28, 2020 6:36 pm
Top


Return to Arch Linux ARM

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 4 guests