00:19 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> woah, this is so cool, I got an unmodified Ubuntu arm64 ISO booted on my NanoPi R4S.

00:29 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> network working and everything

00:29 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> no patches or anything

00:31 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> give me a break. of course it was patched 🙂

00:32 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> something was patched somewhere. Not saying vanilla mainline doesn't work on most boards. But nothing released by debian or ubuntu is not patched.

00:35 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> very kool that it works., I heard they better started supporting arm.

00:35 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> started better? i don't know. they are working on being better on the arm front.

00:37 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> I mean u-boot from armbian is handling the dt stuff, but it's passing it perfectly to userspace.

00:38 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> I did a straight up dd of ubuntu-22.04.1-live-server-arm64.iso

00:38 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> as for kernels though. what they do is pick a point and from there patch it and continue doing so through out that release cycle. So say its linux 5.19.whatever. Just because thats the release you see being installed does not have all the fixes from 6.0 and whatever else they decided to add to the kernel.

00:38 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> sure, but it's cool u-boot's UEFI is mature enough to boot any live USB you want

00:38 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> doesn't mean it does not have*

00:39 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> yeah thats pretty sweat.

00:40 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> lets not assume its not patched is all 🙂

00:40 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> I doubt it has RK3399 patches

00:40 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> r4s is not a new board

00:41 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> I guess. I'm just very impressed this works.

00:41 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> as for rk3399 the basics for getting that to boot with no special patching is doable. I did it yesterday on the T4 as I was trying to debug something.

00:41 <stipa> could be luck

00:42 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> both ethernet ports work too

00:42 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> very nice.

00:42 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> y'all hard to impress.

00:42 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> one place to check would be to see what their u-boot package is patching.

00:43 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> debian doesn't patch all that much but it does patch u-boot. I never checked ubuntu's recent one.

00:43 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> I'm not using their u-boot

00:43 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> I'm using armbian u-boot with a small patch of my own

00:44 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> well then its not working out of the box then, is it?

00:44 <stipa> the ubuntu image works

00:44 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> either way. sweet.

00:45 <stipa> sweet potatoes

00:46 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> I'm all for things being simple. I'm interested to see how this pans out in the future.

00:47 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> Semantics. I say because I only need a single uboot that can boot any unmodified uefi USB image, that counts as unmodified.

00:48 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> hogwash

00:50 <Armbian-Discord> <g​ambl0r> @dave I'm impressed 🙂

00:51 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> all those uboot devs wasting their time. this guy only needs one binary.

00:51 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> That’s a fair opinion. At the end of the day, the boot loader is always going to be custom.

00:52 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> maybe you should take over the project and save us all the hassle.

00:52 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> I'm mostly joking with you so please don't get upset. 🙂

00:53 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> It’s because of uboot handling all the device specific stuff and giving us a unified solution (UEFI). 😛

00:53 <Armbian-Discord> <g​ambl0r> it's too early for popcorn

00:53 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> I've heard this many times from people about u-boot and I always find it to be funny.

00:53 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> there is no unified u-boot solution

00:53 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> You hear about people using u-boot with UEFI often…?

00:53 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> yeah I use it

00:54 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> there is is currently no one fits all type thing

00:54 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> Sure there is, uboot booting UEFI is a unified solution. Everything after u-boot can be generic (mostly)

00:54 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> u-boot doesn't all get flashed to the same location and some boards needs gpt where other can't use gpt.

00:54 <stipa> it would be if hardware was standardized

00:54 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> so thats just a joke i hope.

00:55 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> That’s the whole point of UEFI. It’s standardized.

00:55 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> alright

00:57 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> I can boot Arch Linux or Debian with the same u-boot image.

00:57 <Armbian-Discord> <d​ave> No fiddling with cmdline arguments.

00:58 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> I think steev from kali worked out one could flash an RK and AW uboot bin to the same medium and have the boot process work. But the problem still is... not all boards use the same boot bins or ATF.

00:59 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> So its still super specific and not a one size fits all. Also RK generally uses GPT for UEFI and AW uses MBR.

01:00 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> its just a very big mess I think.

01:01 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> You should be able to boot any distro if you are providing the uboot bin.

01:01 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> and the kernel has support for what u are trying to boot.

01:01 <stipa> yeah and on top of that there are silicon bugs

01:01 <stipa> and undocumented hardware

01:02 <stipa> it's all one process

01:05 <stipa> with parts that are interdependent

01:05 <stipa> a hierarchy doesn't make sense

01:06 <stipa> if things don't work

01:11 <c0rnelius> i think the confusion is with the term `unified u-boot solution`. at least for me anyway as I don't believe in it.

01:11 <stipa> you can lie in social hierarchies and politics and pretend a hierarchy works if it's broken, that's not the case with machines

01:12 <stipa> c0rnelius: well, if everything works to an user it looks like that

01:14 <stipa> no one will ever know what it takes to get it to that point

01:15 <stipa> which is a mess that's presented as something unified

01:17 <stipa> dave and every board has its own mess

01:17 <c0rnelius> yeah it is what it is. not gonna worry to much about it. I expect things to not work all the same on arm. When things do trend towards something more uniform I'm happy to see it.

01:19 <stipa> right

01:32 <steev> Wasn’t me, it was vagrant at Debian, ftr

02:32 <Armbian-Discord> <c​0rnelius> Thanx for the correction. My bad.

09:31 <Armbian-Discord> <b​albes150> It's funny to read about "opinions about the impossibility of u-boot+efi and universal images" based on ignorance. 🙂 A few years ago, solutions were released, as it is easy and simple to solve, even on shitty AML TV boxes. And about RK and AW - it's very easy to solve.

09:32 <stipa> yeah, it's easy when it's working

12:42 <Armbian-Discord> <M​anoftheSea> Unless there's stuff like amlogic boot conflict with gpt header that makes amlogic permanently legacy

22:20 <Armbian-Discord> <T​onymac32> Sigh every U-boot is a special snowflake. After that is taken care of sure, generic images

22:45 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> not a single board from any vendor has a decent-enough EFI-capable bootloader nicely in SPI shipping from factory. prove me wrong

22:46 <nekomancer[m]> apple, microsoft?

22:49 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> lol, indeed, apple 'boards' with intel cpus are indeed EFI capable

22:49 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> not the arm64 though AFAIK.

22:50 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> let me rephrase not a single aarch64 board from any vendor has a decent-enough EFI-capable bootloader nicely in SPI shipping from factory. prove me wrong

23:01 <stipa> if there was there wouldn't be a need for armbian

23:03 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> incorrect, I use Armbian even on boards that have decent EFI. Mostly Neoverse

23:03 <stipa> yeah, but you could use something else too

23:04 <archetech> petitboot+dtb=EFI

23:04 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> 🤢 🤮

23:05 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> I missed your jokes archetech

23:05 <stipa> he's serious

23:06 <archetech> my n2 has booted any distro ive cared to try

23:06 <stipa> Cloning a Rare ISA Card to Use a Rare CD Drive ^^

23:09 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> I think no-one here is the target of generic images, since the amount of fiddling needed to get such generic images going in the first place. typical user would write "iso" to USB, stick in board, doesn't work, thrown in drawer.

23:11 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> so I respect the whole noble idea of generic, just don't see it being useful to me anytime soon

23:11 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> and when it is, I use Armbian generic uefi-arm64 already, so done deal.

23:12 <Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> now go back to hacking on uboot to get to the wonderful world of non-uboot.