Tido Posted February 8, 2019 Posted February 8, 2019 @Igor, @zador.blood.stained Please stay calm - this is just my curiosity - Rome wasn't built in a day. Further I hope nobody will reply over at OMV, TK has ALWAYS found what he was looking for. TK is ... as usually, in this thread. However, my understanding is, with the latest changes in Armbian an apt-get dist-upgrade does no longer touch the Kernel or U-Boot, am I right or wrong? http://forum.openmediavault.org/index.php/Thread/23508-OMV-for-RockPro64-and-other-RK3399-devices-soon/?postID=195118#post195118 If I am wrong, and I was always a great fan of stable release - is it planned to build that in ?
Igor Posted February 8, 2019 Posted February 8, 2019 12 minutes ago, Tido said: or U-Boot Only u-boot/boot scripts are excluded from automatic (apt upgrade) updating. Kernel upgrades are usually not critical. XU4 issues which @tkaiser is referring to didn't break the booting or any vital functions of the board. In fact, upgrade to 4.19.y was reverted in matter of days so it only affected small number of users. Nothing critical has happened and future upgrades are much safer since u-boot and boot scripts has to be upgraded manually.
Tido Posted February 8, 2019 Posted February 8, 2019 4 minutes ago, Igor said: Only u-boot/boot scripts are excluded I see and if the user would like to turn off Kernel updates as well, the user can do this: disable automatic kernel updates: sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list # deb http://apt.armbian.com /* current release */ main Great, thank you. As I wrote, it is not about TKs issue over at OMV - it was more a question of mine and maybe for others for understanding.
Igor Posted February 8, 2019 Posted February 8, 2019 Just now, Tido said: I see and if the user would like to turn off Kernel updates as well, the user can do this: Or: armbian-config -> system -> freeze
Tido Posted February 8, 2019 Posted February 8, 2019 Ah yes, this was even written in the thread. Taking this a bit further, Linux Distros keep your old Kernel, ChromeOS keeps a whole copy, so you can always roll back. I remember seeing a thread about Multiboot in our forum.. here it is: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/5930-multiboot-selector-for-your-tv-box/ instead of multibootOS, keep your current Kernel & U-Boot installed ... so that even if you upgrade with great attention and backup.. one could go back to previous working configuration. Keeping in mind connected via HDMI, SSH or UART. I guess this would even be for development an interesting feature?
Igor Posted February 8, 2019 Posted February 8, 2019 24 minutes ago, Tido said: ChromeOS keeps a whole copy, Like all / most desktop Linux distributions which uses standard methods via GRUB. Here we still have too big diversity to do anything about.
Tido Posted February 10, 2019 Posted February 10, 2019 On 2/8/2019 at 1:02 PM, Igor said: standard methods via GRUB but it sounds like we have to look around the corner, something is coming EFI Support We are moving towards having standardize boot by supporting EFI. However, the bootloading process is using the EFI facilities and you will now have a EFI-based GRUB GUI that lets you control boot parameters where as it was hard coded before. https://libre.computer/ 1
Igor Posted February 10, 2019 Posted February 10, 2019 23 minutes ago, Tido said: We are moving towards having standardize boot by supporting EFI. However, the bootloading process is using the EFI facilities and you will now have a EFI-based GRUB GUI that lets you control boot parameters where as it was hard coded before. It's simple to implement this on image for one machine, while implementing this on all armbian supported boards looks more complicated. For users perspective, things as such bring more on the table. But I do agree we shell pay attention. 1
mdm63 Posted February 17, 2019 Posted February 17, 2019 On 1/1/2019 at 11:48 AM, Igor said: You see only hardware costs and rant about support. We didn't sell you any HW and you don't pay for any services, "Hello Armbian" makes a debt. A small one, but when you multiply this by 1.000, 5.000 or 10.000 we come to a WTF number. Sometimes people's wishes represent a projects worth tens or hundred thousands of euros. They have no clue and they truly expect that "team armbian" will sort that out. For free. And we have to ground them, we have to kill their insane wishes / motivation since there is no other way. This is happening over and over. No need to have a bad day. If your contribution is positive, you cover your debt. If you rant, spam or want something, you are adding. This is how economical relations are made. They drive our world around. It sounds crazy but this its the truth: my job is to limit your spending on support since you are using our credit card. I do understand that. Many people do struggle. Perhaps our project also struggle? It creates roughly 10-20-50x more debt than we have income. The difference is covered with free work and private money earned elsewhere. How long we will be able to survive under such conditions? Dropping support is not popular decision - I know - but is related with lack of resources. Contributors on the other hand are happy with such decisions and their ranting "we support way too many boards" is for me more important than what users want. I only pointed you to the direction how you can change this - either by you dealing with this board or by contribution funds. 3rd options is that we forget talking about this ... Happy new year! So how much do I owe you for these three/four forum posts? How much money I have to pay, to get my question (one) answered? You understand that understanding other people comes foremost out of your own attitude as does your life in general? If some one asks, how can they support them self in the future, as you have dropped support for their hardware. You first reaction is taking it as a rant and ask(one could say demand) money. Well, I have to say I am somewhat surprised, but not too much. So how much I have to donate, that I can get answer to my simple questions, can I still keep compiling Armbian from the sources, even if you have dropped the support for it? In other words, are you going to remove the build support from the sources or have you done so already? Simple Yes or no will suffice, if you consider anything more elaborated is too costly and/or demanding for you.
Igor Posted February 17, 2019 Posted February 17, 2019 14 hours ago, mdm63 said: So how much do I owe you for these three/four forum posts? 14 hours ago, mdm63 said: How much money I have to pay, to get my question (one) answered? Donation is an opportunity to say thanks for what you already have and it gives you nothing in return. It's like love. We don't provide such service to random users. Only in B2B mode, this way: http://jeffacubed.com/the-boilermaker-story-or-knowing-where-to-tap/ We will not invest more of our private money to develop a professional team that will live from selling you hours, to the user base who thinks twice to spent 10 USD for a hardware? It looks like a very stupid idea. Already helping the way we do it now is. 14 hours ago, mdm63 said: as you have dropped support for their hardware. 14 hours ago, mdm63 said: can I still keep compiling Armbian from the sources, even if you have dropped the support for it? Armbian is GPL2 license. Sources are and will be available, but if you want real time personal assistance, you need four-five figure contract. We don't have nobody for in between.
mdm63 Posted February 20, 2019 Posted February 20, 2019 On 2/17/2019 at 6:58 PM, Igor said: Donation is an opportunity to say thanks for what you already have and it gives you nothing in return. It's like love. We don't provide such service to random users. Only in B2B mode, this way: http://jeffacubed.com/the-boilermaker-story-or-knowing-where-to-tap/ We will not invest more of our private money to develop a professional team that will live from selling you hours, to the user base who thinks twice to spent 10 USD for a hardware? It looks like a very stupid idea. Already helping the way we do it now is. Armbian is GPL2 license. Sources are and will be available, but if you want real time personal assistance, you need four-five figure contract. We don't have nobody for in between. Thank you for your impolite, childish and degrading answer. I don't understand what do you think you are going to achieve by behaving like arrogant child. Maybe you just want to use me to vent you personal frustrations like a true school yard bully? If you think that attitude is going to get people to contribute/donate more, I think you are badly mistaken. I would understand your attitude if I would have been burdening you or the devs constantly, but getting treated like this for asking a simple and IMHO justified question, is uncalled-for. Also, as I said in my first post that it was not meant as rant, but to ask a simple question. Now if you still insist on taking is as such, there is little I can do to help you. It's also quite strange that you constantly complain, how your time is so precious and limited, but still, somehow you manage to find time to pick me like a primary school bully. You are a grown up man and you can't find any better way to up your self esteem? I truly feel sorry for you. I wish you a hefty dose of karma and good luck on the path you have chosen. P.S. If you are so fed up with users and their questions and people not contributing/donating/not appreciating (<-this is not true, even if you think it is) your and the dev-teams work. Why the fuck you keep doing this then? If you are fed up with this, do something about it to change it. Taking a piss on your user base for asking simple questions and/or support is not the right solution and you know it.
Heisath Posted February 20, 2019 Posted February 20, 2019 just to answer your original question mdm63, as nobody else seems to be able to give some simple answer without talking about money. As Armbian is hosted on github you will probably always be able to build images for your board even if it is EOS/EOL. Worst case is that you will have to go back and pick some commit in which the board is still available in the build script ( if they at somepoint remove the configs for the board). I would suggest that you make some backup of the current (or last working) version of the buildscript (and maybe cache / kernel) so that even if the repositiory is gone, you can still generate images for your board. Greetings, count-doku
TonyMac32 Posted February 20, 2019 Posted February 20, 2019 1 hour ago, count-doku said: Worst case is that you will have to go back and pick some commit in which the board is still available in the build script ( if they at somepoint remove the configs for the board). There is a difficulty here, because we do not host the kernel sources. Updates to kernel sources often break the configs/patchsets. If you wish to continue an EOS board it would be recommended to clone the kernel, u-boot, and Armbian buildscript at the point of eos. I agree money isn't the best discussion, I also see, however, a constant demand for professional-level support with no hint or interest of contribution of even time. That is just as ugly, but hard to point to as easily. There is a reasonable technical answer with some supporting information: - We have no requirement to support any board. If it is not in our personal interest or benefit it simply won't happen. I think some of the "regular devs" feel pressure and get frustrated that they can't satisfy the whims of the general public. - We have too small of a team to deal with demands and general Linux questions. - the code is all public and opensource, anyone can contribute/fork to do whatever they like board support wise. My personal action in this has been that I don't answer any general questions I don't have an immediate answer for. If no one else does either I can't help that. I think it works out in the end. 1
chwe Posted February 20, 2019 Author Posted February 20, 2019 Well that one went into personal insults of each other which is for sure not what both of you want... Let's try to figure out where and why this went wrong. Starting from here: On 12/31/2018 at 7:35 AM, mdm63 said: What does this mean for me exactly? I have been using Armbian on my Orange pi+ to run Octoprint and my intentions were to make and maintain OctoPi-like image for Orange Pi+ and maybe for some other Orange boards as well, if I find someone interested with some other similar hardware to test etc... Well the answer was more or less there: On 1/1/2019 at 5:56 PM, chwe said: On 1/1/2019 at 7:37 AM, mdm63 said: Did you know that supporting and contributing would be much more appealing if asking couple of simple questions and voicing ones interest to contribute was not pissed on... And that will happen even more often as long as the maintainers are under constant stress. Normally people here show only up if something doesn't work. It's not that they show up with solutions. Maybe this thread would get a complete different spin if you would start with something like "what is needed to bring this board back to full support?" Since the SoC is still supported there won't be that much efforts to keep it alive (doesn't mean that we will do it, but it might be an opportunity for someone who wants to step in). With a EOS we just make it clear that this board won't be supported in the future from the current maintainers. understandable, it's frustrating. when 'your board' gets dropped.. But you must also understand that we can't support every board for years, especially if it's not sold anymore.. It's work to adjust the related patches everytime, to test it before we provide a new image and the support over forum. This thread was meant as a 'board support - general discussion / project aims' not a how to I get *random board supported*. For such a topic you should open your own thread.. E.g. here: https://forum.armbian.com/forum/25-peer-to-peer-technical-support/ (Armbian support ended or never existed - 3rd party boards and external hardware). Hint (since the SoC is still supported you basically need an ubuntu image, a device tree (or fex file in case you deal with the old kernel which I don't recommend) for your board, a defconfig for uboot, the buildscirpt and some time to build your images and see if and what's working (so you get also a clue what it means to support a board... and we support a few more than one).. Such questions show up constantly.. This can be frustrating.. Sometimes you get then a less polite answer.. that's human.. your first post maybe wasn't a rant.. the follow up here clearly were.. From there you can answer (as @Igor did) or as I do quite often... Just ignore it.. I'm mostly not in a mood to answer to stuff which just annoys me, why should I? As others, I donate my time for free and it's not worth to deal with annoying stuff. There's enough funny stuff to do on a project like Armbian. Even helping other people to get familiar with the buildscript can be fun, but clearly not if someone drops partly into the wrong thread, complaining multiple time why his question isn't the most important one we should answer to.. and then complaining about bullying... In case you still want to bring back your board working: Here's one where I implemented a whole new SoC family into armbian: And in this thread I tried to basically show *my workflow* to patch a kernel and u-boot to bring in a feature into an existing board: with those two, and enough time, you should be able to bring back your board into the buildscript.. And if there are still open questions, you can open a thread in P2P and maybe someone is willing to give you some guidance who knows.. I hope we can keep this thread now as for what it was for, in case not I'll either close it for a cool down phase or just delete the off-topic part, depending if I've a good day or not.. 2
lanefu Posted March 22, 2019 Posted March 22, 2019 Hi I wanted to pick back up on this thread as a whole. Ask #1 I'd really like it if we could publish a list of maintainers for boards or board classes. If you all can help with that on the thread, I'll get it to the documentation, and then I'll proceed with some of the next phases of my communication strategy. Since we list what needs maintainers here..... Ask #2 I'd like some feedback about work categorization.@chwe's post here had a really good breakdown of some of the types of work that needed to be done. Some of the themes I saw were: * Platform Stability / Maintenance / Operations * Code quality and Testing * Features / Enhancements * Documentation and UX Do you think the above is flexible enough that most of our work could fall into one of those 4 buckets? 1
lanefu Posted March 22, 2019 Posted March 22, 2019 As you know Armbian has a success problem.... The project has so much recognition that we're getting less experienced users which sometimes struggle with why we can't help as much as they would like. I've touched on some our challenges in the documentation. If you come across a frustrating post from someone, perhaps just cut paste this: Quote I'm sorry that we aren't able to help you. Please take a few minutes to understand some of our project's challenges. Maybe another community member will be able to assist.
Tido Posted March 22, 2019 Posted March 22, 2019 2 hours ago, lanefu said: I've touched on some our challenges in the documentation. I like some of it, but especially in this section I disagree https://docs.armbian.com/Quick_facts/#balancing-development-and-support RPi, really?? I would rather read like: before you go and buy a device, read/search the forum for which device comes with good software/Linux mainline support und which are with less. So you prevent frustration after the purchase. This could be supplemented with: As of today March 2019 these SoC manufacturer work on mainlinging some of their SoC, Rockchip, ... These SBC manufacturer support improvement of mainline Linux Libre Computer, Friendlyelec and so on 1
lanefu Posted March 22, 2019 Posted March 22, 2019 4 hours ago, Tido said: RPi, really?? I would rather read like: before you go and buy a device, read/search the forum for which device comes with good software/Linux mainline support und which are with less. So you prevent frustration after the purchase. Honestly, I think most find out about Armbian after they get one of the SBCs rather than before. For that particular section--its targeted towards already disenchanted newbs as a way to get them to calm down.... But... your point is incredibly valid... What if we spun that off into a "Introduction to SBCs" section to dive deeper into the topic and let that function as an area that could be preventive. 4 hours ago, Tido said: This could be supplemented with: As of today March 2019 these SoC manufacturer work on mainlinging some of their SoC, Rockchip, ... These SBC manufacturer support improvement of mainline Linux Libre Computer, Friendlyelec Yep thats a good idea. I suppose it should link to their active git repos that are part of their mainlining efforts. I'll get that added if someone doesn't do it before me.
lanefu Posted March 22, 2019 Posted March 22, 2019 I moved Community Support Forms above Bug Tracker. Since its the first thing they see, I'm hoping that might help users start with asking for help there, rather than flooding bug tracker.
lanefu Posted March 24, 2019 Posted March 24, 2019 I went through this entire thread to try to capture concrete statements (not rhetorical questions) regarding: Mission Statement Definition of Board Support Policy around release management Ownership and Roles These aspects 4 aspects seem to be where concrete decisions still need to made. I'm hoping my notes might help us move forward on those points. The good news is the technical debt tasks also discussed seemed to be able to be addressed within the thread itself. https://gist.github.com/lanefu/44721de86d321f7bf8be3e511331d754 @Igor are there any of these decisions that you'd like to own outright? Are there any that you'd prefer to fully delegate to someone else? Any thoughts from anyone in general? Would anyone like to draft something formal regarding anything of the points above? 1
Igor Posted March 25, 2019 Posted March 25, 2019 9 hours ago, lanefu said: Are there any that you'd prefer to fully delegate to someone else? Don't have any particular preference.
lanefu Posted March 26, 2019 Posted March 26, 2019 I created a "Feature Requests" forum under the Community Section with a no guarantees disclaimer. Quite frankly its a honeypot to filter out noise, but if we see a really busy thread on there, its either a good idea or totally delusional
Igor Posted December 26, 2019 Posted December 26, 2019 I stumble upon a great post at Home assistant forum, while it originates from OpenHab. Some good points could be imported to our world as well?https://community.openhab.org/t/how-to-ask-a-good-question-help-us-help-you/58396 1
lanefu Posted December 26, 2019 Posted December 26, 2019 2 hours ago, Igor said: Some good points could be imported to our world as well?https://community.openhab.org/t/how-to-ask-a-good-question-help-us-help-you/58396 yeah that's a really good doc. Definitely applies to us.
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