wiki/docs/events/meeting-notes/2023-12-15.md

SIG/AltArch meeting 2023-12-15

Attendees:

* Sherif
* Bryan
* Pablo Greco
* Neil Hanlon
* Skip Grube

Follow Ups

• Libre Compute - Try/Investigate using vendor tree to build uboot - Pratham
• Investigate arm-image-installer script/tool for helping write disk images for specific boards - Sherif (?)
• Odroid N2 - Track installability
• Orange Pi 5 - Track installability
• Rock5b - Track installability
• Libre Computing Boards (3)
• Maintenance - Importing dependencies from Fedora/EPEL
  • Neil is working on this as part of SIG/HPC, too
• Document process on backporting uboot and kernels - Pablo
  • To include information on how we work and interact with upstreams, with examples! - Sherif
• Check and investigate which boards have hardcoded grubx64 paths in their uboot; address them

Discussions

• Neil provided Sherif with 2 RPi CM4s (+ IO boards), an RPi5, and a SiFive VF2 (RiscV) at SC23 in November
• Need to work on integrating SBC and related changes into SIG/Kernel mainline in order to have unified kernel
  • Bryan has tried mainline kernel, but it isn't booting -- ends up in dracut shell.
    • Will figure out how to capture logs via serial
    • Libre Tritium H5
• It's all Skip's fault
• 32-bit arm (armhfp/arm7vl) Rocky Port
  • Sherif has some odroid boards from work he can donate
    • Odroid XU4 x2
    • Odroid XU4Q x1 - XU4 w/ massive heatsink
  • Current status (per Pablo)
    • have the full bootstrap up to 9.1; we need to start building atop it
    • need to add Peridot support for armhfp (i can't remember if we included the arch as an option)
    • where will we host the odroid boards from Sherif
  • Most of the SBCs for arm7vl/armhfp are not powerful enough to be good build hosts. Maybe we should try Honeycombs? (Solid-run)
    • Pablo used his honeycomb and a fedora image to do the initial bootstrap builds
    • Neil will reach out to OSU about availability of Lenovo eMAGs for us
    • has neil spoken to Fabian? - No ; Neil will do this
• RISCv Rocky Port Status
  • Neil - Investigate what and how much riscv hardware we need.. and where we'll host it
    • This probably is going to be a whole bunch of VF2s
    • P670 (16-core - MilkV oasis) would be great, but, upstream support is not yet there. VF2 is a better target for Rocky 9
• Various conversations happened here but Neil was dealing with keeping all the mice in his house dead. The following is second-hand :)
• Rpi Kernel - Should it live?
  • We want to get rid of it, but we can't yet. Skip says yes
  • Plan:
    • Build the rpi kernel as a variant of the mainline
    • rpi kernel will be subsumed into kernel-mainline-sbc, not further upstream
      • This will allow more obvious contribution to ELrepo for SBCs
    • RPI image will be replaced with a new GenericArm-SBC image produced by Empanadas which includes kernel-mainline-sbc
• Next meetings
  • Dec 29 - Cancel.
  • Jan 12 - Keep

Action Items

• Neil to actually make tickets for the follow ups / decisions. But, like, for real this time.
• Neil to reach out to people re: ARMHFP hardwares
  • Ampere
  • OSUOSL
  • Fabian (arrfab)
• Neil to figure out what RISCv hardware we need
• Announce Dec 29th meeting cancelation

Old business

2023-10-20

Action Items

• Libre Compute - Try/Investigate using vendor tree to build uboot - Pratham
• Investigate arm-image-installer script/tool for helping write disk images for specific boards - Sherif (?)
• Odroid N2 - Track installability
• Orange Pi 5 - Track installability
• Rock5b - Track installability
• Libre Computing Boards (3)
• Maintenance - Importing dependencies from Fedora/EPEL
• Document process on backporting uboot and kernels - Pablo
  • To include information on how we work and interact with upstreams, with examples! - Sherif
• Check and investigate which boards have hardcoded grubx64 paths in their uboot; address them
• Acquire armhfp (arm7vl) hardware - Neil to reach out to OSU OSL
• Neil - Investigate what and how much riscv hardware we need.. and where we'll host it

Decisions

* Images should be generic so as to be able to be installed on any board, where possible.
    * uboot can live on SPI or external flash
    * We need to help document this for our users and have guides on how to get the SBCs working. This is a big pain point for many SBC users as there is so much variation.
        * To this end, we should investigate some tooling to aid in writing images for boards which will boot on the first try.
* Uboot should similarly be generic and work for all boards, insofar as it is practical to do so.
    * Some boards this doesn't make sense for, e.g., ones that have uboot from 2014 + hundreds of patches, however, these are few and far between. For these, we can package them as RPMs and provide them (see note below re: licensing)
* We will wait for the next Kernel.org LTS to be cut, as that should have all the changes for the boards we're talking about.
* We will engage with our upstreams (Fedora, ELRepo, etc) for changes we make with the Kernel SIG for AltArch/SBC support.
    * This necessitates participating in SIG/Kernel to represent our needs in these kernels.
* We should strive to perform native builds when possible, but recognize that emulation is a necessary evil.

!!! note "uboot and other licensing" We need to ensure that we are careful about the licensing of softwares we wish to include in the SIG distribution.