Skip to content

SIG/AltArch meeting 2023-12-15

Attendees:

* Sherif
* Bryan
* Pablo Greco
* Neil Hanlon
* Skip Grube

Follow Ups

  • Libre Compute - Try/Investigate using vendor tree to build uboot - Pratham
  • Investigate arm-image-installer script/tool for helping write disk images for specific boards - Sherif (?)
  • Odroid N2 - Track installability
  • Orange Pi 5 - Track installability
  • Rock5b - Track installability
  • Libre Computing Boards (3)
  • Maintenance - Importing dependencies from Fedora/EPEL
    • Neil is working on this as part of SIG/HPC, too
  • Document process on backporting uboot and kernels - Pablo
    • To include information on how we work and interact with upstreams, with examples! - Sherif
  • Check and investigate which boards have hardcoded grubx64 paths in their uboot; address them

Discussions

  • Neil provided Sherif with 2 RPi CM4s (+ IO boards), an RPi5, and a SiFive VF2 (RiscV) at SC23 in November
  • Need to work on integrating SBC and related changes into SIG/Kernel mainline in order to have unified kernel
    • Bryan has tried mainline kernel, but it isn't booting -- ends up in dracut shell.
      • Will figure out how to capture logs via serial
      • Libre Tritium H5
  • It's all Skip's fault
  • 32-bit arm (armhfp/arm7vl) Rocky Port
    • Sherif has some odroid boards from work he can donate
      • Odroid XU4 x2
      • Odroid XU4Q x1 - XU4 w/ massive heatsink
    • Current status (per Pablo)
      • have the full bootstrap up to 9.1; we need to start building atop it
      • need to add Peridot support for armhfp (i can't remember if we included the arch as an option)
      • where will we host the odroid boards from Sherif
    • Most of the SBCs for arm7vl/armhfp are not powerful enough to be good build hosts. Maybe we should try Honeycombs? (Solid-run)
      • Pablo used his honeycomb and a fedora image to do the initial bootstrap builds
      • Neil will reach out to OSU about availability of Lenovo eMAGs for us
      • has neil spoken to Fabian? - No ; Neil will do this
  • RISCv Rocky Port Status
    • Neil - Investigate what and how much riscv hardware we need.. and where we'll host it
      • This probably is going to be a whole bunch of VF2s
      • P670 (16-core - MilkV oasis) would be great, but, upstream support is not yet there. VF2 is a better target for Rocky 9
  • Various conversations happened here but Neil was dealing with keeping all the mice in his house dead. The following is second-hand :)
  • Rpi Kernel - Should it live?
    • We want to get rid of it, but we can't yet. Skip says yes
    • Plan:
      • Build the rpi kernel as a variant of the mainline
      • rpi kernel will be subsumed into kernel-mainline-sbc, not further upstream
        • This will allow more obvious contribution to ELrepo for SBCs
      • RPI image will be replaced with a new GenericArm-SBC image produced by Empanadas which includes kernel-mainline-sbc
  • Next meetings
    • Dec 29 - Cancel.
    • Jan 12 - Keep

Action Items

  • Neil to actually make tickets for the follow ups / decisions. But, like, for real this time.
  • Neil to reach out to people re: ARMHFP hardwares
    • Ampere
    • OSUOSL
    • Fabian (arrfab)
  • Neil to figure out what RISCv hardware we need
  • Announce Dec 29th meeting cancelation

Old business

2023-10-20

Action Items

  • Libre Compute - Try/Investigate using vendor tree to build uboot - Pratham
  • Investigate arm-image-installer script/tool for helping write disk images for specific boards - Sherif (?)
  • Odroid N2 - Track installability
  • Orange Pi 5 - Track installability
  • Rock5b - Track installability
  • Libre Computing Boards (3)
  • Maintenance - Importing dependencies from Fedora/EPEL
  • Document process on backporting uboot and kernels - Pablo
    • To include information on how we work and interact with upstreams, with examples! - Sherif
  • Check and investigate which boards have hardcoded grubx64 paths in their uboot; address them
  • Acquire armhfp (arm7vl) hardware - Neil to reach out to OSU OSL
  • Neil - Investigate what and how much riscv hardware we need.. and where we'll host it

Decisions

* Images should be generic so as to be able to be installed on any board, where possible.
    * uboot can live on SPI or external flash
    * We need to help document this for our users and have guides on how to get the SBCs working. This is a big pain point for many SBC users as there is so much variation.
        * To this end, we should investigate some tooling to aid in writing images for boards which will boot on the first try.
* Uboot should similarly be generic and work for all boards, insofar as it is practical to do so.
    * Some boards this doesn't make sense for, e.g., ones that have uboot from 2014 + hundreds of patches, however, these are few and far between. For these, we can package them as RPMs and provide them (see note below re: licensing)
* We will wait for the next Kernel.org LTS to be cut, as that should have all the changes for the boards we're talking about.
* We will engage with our upstreams (Fedora, ELRepo, etc) for changes we make with the Kernel SIG for AltArch/SBC support.
    * This necessitates participating in SIG/Kernel to represent our needs in these kernels.
* We should strive to perform native builds when possible, but recognize that emulation is a necessary evil.

uboot and other licensing

We need to ensure that we are careful about the licensing of softwares we wish to include in the SIG distribution.