Orange Pi One

[Milan Obuch]

On Fri, 22 Apr 2016 11:05:23 +0200
Emmanuel Vadot <manu at bidouilliste.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Apr 2016 07:58:04 +0200
> Milan Obuch <freebsd-arm at dino.sk> wrote:
> 
> > Just to explain better what I wrote and why:
> > 
> > - what Emmanuel wrote sounds to me like 'if it does not have netboot
> >   ability it is worthless' and thus should be not made public (maybe
> >   not correct undestanding, somewhat exaggerated etc.)
> > 
> > - this is something I am opposed to - even u-boot supporting only
> > boot from SD is much much better than no u-boot at all. At least if
> > you *really* need netboot functionality you have something working
> > to base your work on.
> > 
> > - I do not feel netbooting is not usefull, it can help tremendously
> >   when you can't easily swap boot media, imagine MMC soldered on
> >   board... but in this particular case, I mean developing for
> > Orange Pi One board, it is only *convenience* thing, not hard
> > *requirement*
> > 
> > I hope I clarified my position with this and no flame war will
> > arise :) Actually I have an idea where should I (or someone more
> > motivated than I in this functionality) begin looking for solution
> > of this problem, it is a bit deeper in uboot I would like to go to
> > for now.
> > 
> > Do we agree it is still worth publishing/submitting to ports tree
> > even with some missing functionality? At least it could be
> > documented there and that's it.
> >   
> 
>  This is not really what I meant.
> 
>  Currently all the allwinner uboot port depend on one master
> (cubieboard) and there is no reason for this to change because then
> we will have multiple copies of the patches etc ... The
> u-boot-cubieboard port is tied to one u-boot version (2015.04), for
> some board we need to update this but, as said before, u-boot >
> 2015.04 for allwinner cannot be compiled with api net support. We
> cannot break existing build that use the u-boot net api
> functionality. That's why I have (for now) my own ports. What I
> really need to do is to definitivelly fix this uboot api net problem.
> 

Well, I am not against it, use one base would be fine, but there is
simply no support for Allwinner H3 based boards in any mainline uboot
before 2016.01-rc3. It is documented on http://linux-sunxi.org/H3 page
this way. We could use maybe (I think it is) vendor provided uboot from
GitHub as documented on http://www.orangepi.org/Docs/Building.html
page. I see no possibility to derive either (easily) from
u-boot-cubieboard port, neither do I feel it has any real benefit.

Also, I see no harm in publishing port and after some time deprecate
it, when the same or better functionality is present in new port. But I
like an idea of having ports repository as a central point where
something is searched. It is known and easier to find than some random
site of any random developer. That's all.

Regards,
Milan