General guidance for mainline vs. specific kernels

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General guidance for mainline vs. specific kernels

Postby leothrix » Wed Aug 01, 2018 4:38 am

So I've got a wide variety of boards in my homelab, including several Pi revisions, ODroid C2s/XU4s/HC1/HC2/etc. While I normally let the default kernel package as the initial installation has it set, I stumbled upon some of the generic/mainline kernel packages on some of the repositories, such as $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'linux-aarch64') and $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'linux-armv7').

In general terms, is there any documentation/guidance for when/if these "generic" kernels can be used in lieu of their board-specific counterparts like $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'linux-odroid-xu3')? While my boards work fine, having a recent mainline kernel over a pinned version would be nice to stay apprised of recent kernel improvements (I have some random experiments floating around that could benefit from bleeding-edge changes to the upstream mainline kernel).

My guess is that in most cases, these mainline/generic versions probably don't support onboard GPUs well (i.e. Mali drivers) but I would expect that to be the case. In the case of a purely headless host, that point is moot anyway, so if the limiting factor is binary GPU blobs, there wouldn't be a reason to avoid the mainline kernels, AFAIK.

I totally admit that I could discern this through experimentation, but knowing the explicit intent for these packages would help clarify exactly how I should be using them, since I wouldn't want to jump the gun if they're mostly just put out there as a "best-effort" project (which, don't get me wrong, I appreciate!)

Based upon what I've found, it would seem that the stance is probably "mainline kernels compiled for each architecture are available, but may not fully support all board features and drivers". Is that accurate, or is there any testing/additional details re: supported features in mainline that is floating around?

Thanks you for any assistance and for the great work that Arch Linux ARM is!
leothrix
 
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