Debian Installer: Support for Orange Pi Zero (H2+)

[anadahz]

Dear Armbian community, not sure if this the right place for this thread, please
feel free to move it.

 

I'm testing the Debian Installer Buster (alpha release) after seeing that
there is (partial) support for the 5 there is (partial) support for the•Orange
PI zero (H2+) and other boards.

It seems that the u-boot packages in Debian miss the u-boot build for the Orange
Pi zero and support for the Ethernet controller as it seems it is not the
mainline kernel yet and seems to be needing some work in order to be available
in kernel 4.15.

 

Armbian already includes the u-boot build and has support for the Ethernet
controller of the Orange PI zero, how one could bring u-boot and Ethernet support
in upcoming installation or even in current stable Debian releases?
Can we work on a way to port these changes to Debian perhaps with the use of
packages until there is support in the mainline Linux kernel?

You can find the complete discussion in the relevant Debian bug:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=883549

[zador.blood.stained]

22 minutes ago, anadahz said:

Armbian already includes the u-boot build and has support for the Ethernet
controller of the Orange PI zero, how one could bring u-boot and Ethernet support
in upcoming installation or even in current stable Debian releases?

Armbian is already based on stable Debian or Ubuntu - it uses upstream Debian/Ubuntu repositories with a custom package selection, additional userspace scripts, services and helpers, and a custom u-boot and kernel. So you can either install Armbian u-bot and kernel on top of a Debian image or start with an Armbian image and remove everything that you don't need.

 

25 minutes ago, anadahz said:

Can we work on a way to port these changes to Debian perhaps with the use of
packages until there is support in the mainline Linux kernel?

I'm pretty sure that this doesn't work that way - Debian/Ubuntu won't backport new hardware support to their stable kernel, and some hardware like Xradio wireless will not be supported at all.

 

[anadahz]

2 minutes ago, zador.blood.stained said:

Armbian is already based on stable Debian or Ubuntu - it uses upstream Debian/Ubuntu repositories with a custom package selection, additional userspace scripts, services and helpers, and a custom u-boot and kernel. So you can either install Armbian u-bot and kernel on top of a Debian image or start with an Armbian image and remove everything that you don't need.

My point is to bring these packages, userspace scripts, services, helpers, the custom u-boot builds in Debian and not remove packages from Armbian (that uses upstream Debian/Ubuntu repositories) to make it be something like Debian.
I just see the value of having an interaction between Debian <-> Armbian with Debian being more stable and not having the bleeding edge features that Armbian has.

That's why I'm thinking to bring all these required hardware specific "changes" in a package that can be added during the installation, similar to the non-free hardware support for Ethernet controllers and other hardware in Debian installer.

2 minutes ago, zador.blood.stained said:

I'm pretty sure that this doesn't work that way - Debian/Ubuntu won't backport new hardware support to their stable kernel, and some hardware like Xradio wireless will not be supported at all.

 

There are many different ways to add repositories and packages that can support hardware, and some may be even integrated in the Debian backports.
Once these packages exit I can even hosted to an external deb repository or add them in a special Armbian repository that can potentially benefit many different distributions and people that struggle with compiling and finding the right firmware/u-boot unit/configuration quirk combination to support these devices.

[zador.blood.stained]

3 minutes ago, anadahz said:

My point is to bring these packages, userspace scripts, services, helpers, the custom u-boot builds in Debian and not remove packages from Armbian (that uses upstream Debian/Ubuntu repositories) to make it be something like Debian.

...

That's why I'm thinking to bring all these required hardware specific "changes" in a package that can be added during the installation, similar to the non-free hardware support for Ethernet controllers and other hardware in Debian installer.

Some things can be installed directly from .deb packages or from the repository (http://apt.armbian.com/) while other things are made at the image build time and cannot be easily packaged. debian-installer support is another question - it was never considered since on these devices you usually have only one bootable device and may not have a display and a keyboard for a usual interactive installation.

 

7 minutes ago, anadahz said:

Once these packages exit I can even hosted to an external deb repository or add them in a special Armbian repository that can potentially benefit many different distributions and people that struggle with compiling and finding the right firmware/u-boot unit/configuration quirk combination to support these devices.

Still .deb packages are specific to Debian and Debian derivatives so I'm not sure about the "many different distributions" part. You can unpack .deb files and copy the u-boot and kernel to any other modern Linux distro, but I'm not sure if we will be making packages for other distributions anytime soon.

[anadahz]

2 minutes ago, zador.blood.stained said:

Some things can be installed directly from .deb packages or from the repository (http://apt.armbian.com/) while other things are made at the image build time and cannot be easily packaged. debian-installer support is another question - it was never considered since on these devices you usually have only one bootable device and may not have a display and a keyboard for a usual interactive installation.

Great 'apt.armbian.com' is a good place to check for some board specific packages.
For headless devices, serial support during installation will suffice or SSH support that can be enabled via preseeding that is often the main installation method for headless servers. What remains to be found now are the "things" that cannot be packaged and are created during the image build time, do you refer to the u-boot units or is there something else?
By the way Debian has already support for a number of u-boot builds: https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/u-boot/

 

Currently it's hard to find out what exactly is the "missing sauce" needed for these board to boot up, i identified already:
- A custom u-boot image
- A kernel module

I guess more things may be missing, almost everything can be packaged.

2 minutes ago, zador.blood.stained said:

Still .deb packages are specific to Debian and Debian derivatives so I'm not sure about the "many different distributions" part. You can unpack .deb files and copy the u-boot and kernel to any other modern Linux distro, but I'm not sure if we will be making packages for other distributions anytime soon.

You are right there are many more distributions out there, I was referring to Debian and derivatives.
But still I can see some value from this effort as people may want to support new devices in other (non deb specific) distributions too.

 

I appreciate a lot your feedback and support on this effort. Thank you!

[anadahz]

From Armbian APT repository I identified the following packages required for the Orange PI zero:

linux-dtb-next-sunxi - Device blobs package for the Linux kernel
linux-image-next-sunxi - Linux kernel, modules and config files for sunxi
linux-u-boot-orangepizero-next - Uboot loader for Orange PI zero

Is it sufficient to just add these package in a Debian image or is there anything else missing to boot an OrangePi zero?

[zador.blood.stained]

You'll need a boot script and environment (i.e. rootfs type and UUID), and you'll need to flash the u-boot image to a correct location on the microSD card or to the SPI flash.