[Dev] Canceling of Parabola ARM

[Luke]

The two test boards provided were Beaglebone and Raspberry Pi. If
someone is willing to donate a board which is capable of booting without
blobs this project could be re-launched. I backed my work (e.g.
mplayer-libre), prior to the git removal.

My current plan is to free several packages on my personal git and wait
until a board comes along which is cable of running a fully free kernel
that we can make tests on. Then this could continue at a later date.

If you are willing to donate the All Winner, it may be worth testing.
Ask Emulatorman if he can share his latest PKGBUILD of linux-libre with
you. However be aware that if it requires a blob you might be left with
a non-usable device. Make backups of the current SDCard.

I do not have the full list of blobs, Emulatorman mentioned several in
the IRC which were required for the two previous boards to operate.


On 08/23/2015 07:44 AM, Josh Branning wrote:
> On 23/08/15 04:47, Michał Masłowski wrote:
>>> RNC patches which
>>> are required for the kernel to run on ARM computers
>>
>> Not true.
>>
>>> You can read more information about blobs on ARM devices here:
>>> https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers
>>
>> We support x86 while many systems there need blobs for optional graphics
>> acceleration, and nearly all have nonfree boot firmware.
>>
>>> These boards, including Raspberry Pi, actually REQUIRE the blobs in
>>> order to boot. Therefore until a blob-free board is available, we are
>>> unable to continue our work. This is unfortunate, but the current
>>> situation of hardware doesn't allow a true GNU/Linux-libre kernel.
>>
>> Boards using TI or AllWinner SoCs don't have such blobs.  Please list
>> specific blobs which are the issue.
>>
>> (For AM335x used in BeagleBone Black, there is a small power management
>> firmware under a nonfree license, but the SoC documentation suggests it
>> being needed only for suspend to RAM which I don't believe is normally
>> useful on that board.  Regardless of this, that firmware looks easy to
>> replace.)
>
> +1
>
> I have the olinuxino-lime which has a AllWinner A10 chip and it uses
> u-boot, and framebuffer, so theoretically there would be no blobs. At
> the moment it runs arch linux arm, but I would prefer parabola.
>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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