Support of Raspberry Pi

[MathiasRenner]

Hello everyone,

 

I would like to build an image for the Rasperry Pi 1, 2 and Zero.

I could not found a download for a RPi on armbian.com. Then I saw that `rpi` is disabled in `/lib/configuration.sh`. Even when enabling it, I get an error during build, saying "[ error ] Building failed, check configuration" .

 

I wonder why the Raspberry Pi is not supported. Is it due to its closed hardware?

 

Thanks!

[Igor]

Welcome!

 

The main reason why it's disabled is that I never finished the configuration & testing part. My motivations is low to play with it  

 

I wanted to create fw -> u-boot -> kernel loading way which cause me headaches then I simply went doing other things ...

 

other:

- closed

- poorly designed

- already supported by many distributions

https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi

[Code4Sale LLC]

I suppose developing for the Raspberry Pi would seem like a step backwards, however, there I would think there would be some real benefits that might reap some huge rewards.

 

When looking at the download list, I was impressed. And the second thing I looked for was a distro for the RasPi. It was missing. oh!

 

I would think that RasPi org would work with you, assist you, and put your distro on the main page. Wow. That's a pretty large sign to put up, with lots of spotlights for the project.

 

I could be wrong about that (getting help and assistance), and of that was the case, it sure would make a great story to tell.

 

Having a RasPi disto would be very cool. I think most folks coming here probably have more than one board, and whatever boards you do have, I would bet one is a RasPi, and you use it as a benchmark to measure everything else against. With that, I would like to use armbain to bench with!

 

So while dev'ing for a RasPi might not be a lot of fun, I do see a RasPi distro as essential, both as a benchmark, and for the shear publicity that would be derived from it.

 

I also understand that there is only so much that everyone involved can take on, and for that, I am very thankful.

 

And thank you for the time, space, and freedom to post an opinion!

 

Thank you for being free (as in cost and open-source). and I urge folks to remember, it's not really free (as is cost), it is a "gift" of time, labor, love, and expense! Please support "free" software.

 

In ending, please consider making the donation button larger, with a little more verbiage to entice folks to push the button, and consider adding more buttons that link to more ways to support the effort. 

 

Who knows, given a "Google Pay" button, even I might press it!

 

Thanks again,

 

Joe

[wildcat_paris]

I would think that RasPi org would work with you, assist you, and put your distro on the main page.

 

I guess it would help Igor.

 

@all

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WilyWerewolf/ReleaseNotes#Linux_kernel_4.2

A new kernel for the Raspberry Pi 2 has also landed in the official archive.

I haven't tested anyway. Revamping 15.10 with jessy and ubuntu kernel ???

[Toast]

on OSMC we are running on 4.3.0-10 on RPI 1 & 2 pretty much on the bleeding edge considering its raspberry pi

[tkaiser]

The only feature that's interesting on the Raspberry Pi is that one can use the VPU correctly now (after a few years). We use RPi B+ as IP camera (even when the CPU core is clocked with just 200 MHz the VPU is able to provide a 1080p@30 fps h.264 encoded video stream) or for digital signage, often combined. In the meantime also lightweight distros exist like http://dietpi.com

 

For everything else the RPi is always the worst choice due to its one single USB 2.0 connection to the outside.

 

Supporting the RPi would mean Armbian either focuses on a completely new use case (desktop stuff -- VPU) or on a completely new user base (clueless people).

[zador.blood.stained]

Supporting RPi versions other than Raspberry Pi 2 is not that simple since BCM2835 is armv6 SoC, and this arch is not officially supported by Debian, this ABI is not compatible with "normal" armhf.

 

So to make more or less usable OS image we need to either compile all Debian packages from scratch and make own "Armbian" package repository, or use Raspbian repository, in which case the obvious questions are - what and why?

What should be the key difference between Raspbian ("Official Debian distro for Raspberry Pi") and "Arm(v6)bian" and why would people choose to install one or the other?

[theguyuk]

I have no kindness toward RPI due to their bullying attitude by staff and mods on their official forum. They also lie with Upton claiming he was happy for other to make RPI inspired boards as it was all about promoting education and hardware building, yet when others start building their own boards RPI fan boys attack them for riding on RPI coat tails.

 

Leave RPI to their own old single core code is my attitude.

 

On the topic of Armbian I hope Igor and tkaiser won't mind me saying I hope Armbian developes to be the ARM based distro of choice and useable by the clueless ( as I am a clueless Linux noobie ). I hope Armbian gets to the stage where children and users can use it for education just as open software for single board computers should be.

[gtoal]

I was astounded at the huge number of Raspberry Pi clones supported by this project, but even more amazed not to see the Pi itself in the downloads section.  Not every Pi user is in love with Raspbian.  I realise this project pretty much exists to provide an OS for Pi competitors but surely it would benefit the project to bring in Pi users too?

Edited December 13, 2016 by zador.blood.stained
Merged with *pinned* discussion of Raspberry Pi

[Igor]

https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/483-support-of-raspberry-pi/

[zador.blood.stained]

I realise this project pretty much exists to provide an OS for Pi competitors but surely it would benefit the project to bring in Pi users too?

I don't agree that bringing here Raspberry Pi users would benefit the Armbian project.

First, another Debian/Ubuntu derivative means fragmentation of user base - not an improvement for Raspberry Pi project.

Second, IMO Armbian project needs more developers, experienced users/experts and maybe sponsors, and not a lot of inexperienced users who bought an SBC for no reason and now don't know what to do with it.

[Toast]

So sick of newbies that over and over request this, the opensource entitlement with users just requesting stuff without thinking of the work that goes into to the project and as Igor and the others here has said before these are so many distros available for raspberry let armbian focus on what it does excellent the other arm boards that doesnt have the support.

[Camilo Martin]

I have a Raspberry Pi and I don't mind if you guys don't port Armbian to it.

 

Politics of the RPi people aside, they charge $35 for a pretty average board, and the "$5" Pi Zero was so short on stock some guy made a "where's my pi zero" website just because of it.

 

And often when they have that Pi Zero board, you have to buy it in a bundle with conveniently overpriced peripherals you likely don't need. In the rare event when they have a Pi Zero on sale, you can't buy more than one, so indeed it's not their real business model but just a marketing tactic.

 

On the other hand, it is a meme board so even well-informed people will use it due to the community effect (same thing happens with the Arduino boards, some of which cost more than a full-blown Linux-capable board).

[Toast]

There are plenty of Debian distores for raspberry pi so short answer no, let this community focus on the rest of the arm devices that dont have a good solid OS like Armbian.

[tkaiser]

On the other hand, it is a meme board so even well-informed people will use it due to the community effect

 

Why not? The average RPi user is clueless and doesn't care about details. And believes in fairy tales and miracles (a mythical RPi foundation saving the world and other stuff like that)

 

It should also be noted that Armbian doesn't support 'Raspberry Pi clones' but interesting ARM based devices instead. For the very same reason we don't support uninteresting devices like those Raspberries.

 

Armbian is not a distro but a build system, a lot of collected knowledge and especially optimized settings 'per board' that should help to squeeze out the max. If we start to support a new board we explore optimal settings and come up with special bootloader and kernel settings -- again 'per board'.

 

All of this is not possible with those Raspberries anyway since the Linux running there is under control of a mythical 'firmware' (it's a proprietary OS running on the proprietary VideoCore processor using proprietary settings and having the ARM cores under full control). For more details please refer to posts #5 and #12 here: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1748-sbc-consumptionperformance-comparisons/

[Camilo Martin]

All of this is not possible with those Raspberries anyway since the Linux running there is under control of a mythical 'firmware' (it's a proprietary OS running on the proprietary VideoCore processor using proprietary settings and having the ARM cores under full control). For more details please refer to posts #5 and #12 here: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1748-sbc-consumptionperformance-comparisons/

 

And another strange symptom (for me): With all RPi 3 OS images after a 'shutdown -h now' the board still wasted between 380 and 450 mW (which is most likely a bug but who knows). Only physically cutting power really helps lowering 'off state' consumption to zero.

 

 

Edit: Shoot, the WYSIWYG editor ate my text and exchanged it for something else... damn, typing again real quick

 

Does this mean there's possibly a backdoor that runs constantly? ~400mW when turned off is a bit too much.

[jernej]

Does this mean there's possibly a backdoor that runs constantly? ~400mW when turned off is a bit too much.

 

Why people every time think on worst possible option? It is more likely that they just forget to disable some clocks for some HW units which still run and eat power.

[tkaiser]

Does this mean there's possibly a backdoor that runs constantly? ~400mW when turned off is a bit too much.

If anything would scare me here then it's consumption behavior when you try to shut CPU cores down. Higher consumption levels with less active CPU cores and also strange load behavior (post #5 in the aforementioned thread) are at least a clear sign that the proprietary 'firmware' controls everything and that Linux running on the CPU cores has not even an idea what's going on

[zador.blood.stained]

All of this is not possible with those Raspberries anyway since the Linux running there is under control of a mythical 'firmware' (it's a proprietary OS running on the proprietary VideoCore processor using proprietary settings and having the ARM cores under full control). For more details please refer to posts #5 and #12 here: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1748-sbc-consumptionperformance-comparisons/

There is an alternative, though pretty limited at the moment: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

[tkaiser]

There is an alternative, though pretty limited at the moment: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

 

Sure, but if I want to do this sort of hacking then I would choose again any other more interesting hardware instead. For the average RPi user this alternative firmware is useless since most of the stuff he's interested in doesn't work. Also it's obvious that RPi foundation will move away from horribly outdated VC4 in the future (maybe already in 2 months when RPi 4 will most likely be announced/available) so maybe development of this alternative will then also be halted.

 

Anyway: I don't think it's a good idea to waste time developing for this platform... too limited when looking at the hardware and the only advantages RPi has are the surroundings: huge user base, therefore decent community support and since everything focussed more or less on a rather limited Debian based distro lack of fragmentation.

[spock]

As far as RPI goes, I will ask around to see what the future might bring (I know people who know) ... but given the ties between the rpi foundation guys and Broadcom, we can expect them to continue to use their silicon and also to stay with something very similar to what they have now.

 

Since Broadcom were taken over by Avago the strategy has changed a bit - and I have seen that in their wifi products, for example. We expect to see the same in their TV products (of which the RPI silicon is an example) eventually. This might mean change for the RPI guys. I can ask around to see what has changed there as this is the technology area that I work in. What I do know is that the Broadcom guys have traditionally been much more expensive than competitors and that they have lost significant share of the TV set top box market to the emerging Chinese vendors. 

 

Perhaps the best idea is to state clearly that the RPIs won't be supported as the Raspbian distro can best cover the needs of the RPI crowd ? Its a simple and clear thing to state and should not be that controversial!

 

BTW, commenting on the lack of availability of the RPI Zero - this is all down to the fact that they lose a pile of money each time they make a batch. and the backstory is that they only released it to get some PR and bash the clones.

[tkaiser]

I can ask around to see what has changed there

 

IMO not necessary. RPi foundation sells fairy tales and uninteresting hardware. And you're right, there's no need to support these boards anytime soon.

[carbon]

I would donate to support those, it is soooo good to download just one tang and have it all ready for all boards. A guy up there told the ABI is not supported, but it is I believe, since raspbian does not compile all userland for raspbian, just the kernel ans some libs, that provide the ABI. AFAIK.  C'mon !  I must say I have not downloaded armbian yet, maybe in a few weeks I will be able to finally shut up or keep bugging ya.

[tkaiser]

As part of this I discovered that (64-bit kernel and userland for RPi 3 that should now also be useable on RPi 2 since newer models also use 64-bit BCM2387). And just for fun I will play around with this and maybe even publish a recipe how to build Armbian for RPi 3.

 

But I really really hope Armbian will never officially support Raspberries since this would be the project's dead (doing development for a platform where a mythical Foundation controls hardware's behaviour through something they euphemistically call 'firmware' we can't alter and dealing with an even larger userbase not caring about anything that's important -- if you buy a Raspberry you do it for a reason. The hardware is totally lame so there's other factors that attract people: and that's free support AKA large community besides the fairy tales a Foundation tells. Please leave this stuff where it belongs to: over at https://www.raspberrypi.org/community/)

[hojnikb]

13 hours ago, tkaiser said:

As part of this I discovered that (64-bit kernel and userland for RPi 3 that should now also be useable on RPi 2 since newer models also use 64-bit BCM2387). And just for fun I will play around with this and maybe even publish a recipe how to build Armbian for RPi 3.

 

But I really really hope Armbian will never officially support Raspberries since this would be the project's dead (doing development for a platform where a mythical Foundation controls hardware's behaviour through something they euphemistically call 'firmware' we can't alter and dealing with an even larger userbase not caring about anything that's important -- if you buy a Raspberry you do it for a reason. The hardware is totally lame so there's other factors that attract people: and that's free support AKA large community besides the fairy tales a Foundation tells. Please leave this stuff where it belongs to: over at https://www.raspberrypi.org/community/)

 

there is this https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

so you cant exactly say rpi only runs on proprietary firmware code. you can run completely free code, but with severe limitations as of right now.

 

as for hw, it true that its nothing special (io side is pretty lame just as it was back in 2012) but i has a HUUUUGE following, which makes things a lot easier sometimes. Why reinvent the wheel, just because you dont like the hw or the politics behind it ?

[hojnikb]

if you dont like their firmware, you can always contribute here

https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

 

 

[zador.blood.stained]

12 hours ago, hojnikb said:

as for hw, it true that its nothing special (io side is pretty lame just as it was back in 2012) but i has a HUUUUGE following, which makes things a lot easier sometimes. Why reinvent the wheel, just because you dont like the hw or the politics behind it ?

Why reinventing the wheel if it already has a big community and all kinds of OS images for the devices? And their community definitely has more resources to deal with aarch64 reintegration and support open source firmware development.

[hojnikb]

there is also a good chance board youre using will still be sold down the road; cant say the same for Chinese boards. So its really not fair to shit on raspberry for reasons stated above. Maybe tkeiser hates rpi because its the most popular kid on the block

 

[Toast]

Still Raspberry Pi has a shitload of distores it doesnt need one more just because, the boards on this forum have little to no support beside the crappy vendor image that often comes with the board. 

 

so please drop the whole i want armbian for raspberry or FORK it and make it yourself. (if i was mod i would have locked this redundant thread down)

[zador.blood.stained]

1 hour ago, hojnikb said:

there is also a good chance board youre using will still be sold down the road; cant say the same for Chinese boards.

And how does this affect Armbian? We are not selling the boards or receiving support for the project proportional to the number of supported boards. And unless we attract more people who are getting stuff done and not more people who just ask "I want Armbian to support this board" without even thinking about contributing a single line of code or a single dollar for the hosting, hardware and consumables (cables, SD cards) supporting Raspberry Pi won't be worth the efforts.

 

42 minutes ago, Toast said:

(if i was mod i would have locked this redundant thread down)

IMO it's better to have at least one open thread for the Raspberry Pi discussion to move all similar questions to. But it may be better to move it to "Free" from "Development" if the discussion steers too far away from the development related things.