Introduction and some new unsupported platform questions

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Introduction and some new unsupported platform questions

Postby rubenvb » Fri Mar 27, 2020 6:20 pm

Hi everyone!

As the invitation of this subforum invited me to do, here's a small forum introduction including a short overview of what I've already done with Archlinux|ARM!

I have been using Archlinux on my home PCs for quite some time, have experience in setting up AUR PKGBUILDs (I made the mingw-w64-gcc cross-compiler package work, it even ended up in [community] for a while).
I have had limited experience with Archlinux|ARM in the days of the original Raspberry Pi model B.

I have recently bought a FriendlyARM NanoPi M4 with SATA hat.
I have been playing around with it a few days and have succeeded in using avafinger's u-boot_v2 and overwriting cleanly (full wipe) the rootfs and boot partitions created with avafinger's Linux 5.3-rc7 images with the generic ArchlinuxArm aarch64 image.
I then made a pair of symlinks so the boot.scr from aforementioned image found the right files.
This means I booted the cleanly extracted generic aarch64 image, with the generic kernel. Only the u-boot and boot.scr were taken over from avafinger's builds. I bet some modifications are needed to get all hardware working (I'm thinking an extra kernel module for the wifi at the very least, maybe some software tuning as well).

It seems to work completely, except for the wifi, which seems to have a CPU hog bug anyway and I wasn't planning on using it.
I still need to build e.g. rockchip libmali, kodi and the rockchip gstreamer plugin (if necessary for Kodi).

I was surprised there was no "generic" Kodi build that I could try, and only one Odroid C2 specific binary for aarch64.
As far as I understand, this board (along with many/some others) provides gbm support on which Kodi can run (albeit with some limitations). In this regard it may be useful to have a more generic build of Kodi for various devices to make use of.

Some general questions as I can't seem to find the proper info for anywhere on the Archlinux|ARM website:
- what would it take to "officially" support this device? What I mean is: what is required for a device to appear in the supported platforms list. I am willing to take on package and image creation tasks and can provide help in solving issues that might pop up. Or is support based on Archlinux|ARM maintainers having physical access to a device at all times?
- Where should I post any information I find/learn about this board in this forum? I hope to figure out how to get this all built from official sources as to provide a simple install experience for this device.

Thanks for reading.
I hope I didn't cross any unwritten lines, but I do want to make clear I want to contribute what I am doing to Archlinux|ARM.
rubenvb
 
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