| 10:29 | suihkulokki> | Ke: I got working efivars. turns out another edk2 branch + a patch to arm-trusted firmware was needed |
| 10:29 | suihkulokki> | Ke: also tested the debian sid 4.14 kernel works on mcbin |
| 10:30 | Ke> | thanks |
| 10:36 | Ke> | will perhaps have my hw already on friday |
| 10:39 | suihkulokki> | the bad news is I seem to have forgotten to add phy-mvebu-cp110-comphy module the installer kernel package |
| 10:39 | suihkulokki> | Ke: also the edk2 needs to be installed to spi, no efivars for SD |
| 10:40 | Ke> | I am moderately ok with no efivars |
| 10:40 | Ke> | though there is the problem with network boot, if other bootsources fail |
| 10:40 | Ke> | which is kind of security isssue |
| 10:44 | agraf> | Ke: no efivars is quite bad, since then edk2 won't find the boot entry after reboot ;) |
| 10:44 | agraf> | suihkulokki: which branch did you use? |
| 10:45 | agraf> | suihkulokki: and does that branch also handle MAC addresses? ;) |
| 10:46 | suihkulokki> | agraf: https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-platform/tree/marvell-armada-wip-variables |
| 10:46 | agraf> | i wonder why marcin didn't push that into the normal tree :/ |
| 10:47 | suihkulokki> | agraf: because it's waiting for this to appear in marvell's atf tree: https://pastebin.com/vW85Erdp |
| 10:48 | suihkulokki> | prebuilt efi with those at: https://people.debian.org/~riku/mcbin/machhiatobin_uefi.bin |
| 10:48 | Ke> | agraf: it will find the EFI removable media standard location |
| 10:48 | agraf> | Ke: only if that gets installed, by default grub won't install to that |
| 10:49 | Ke> | yes, but that was easy to fix |
| 10:49 | suihkulokki> | s,fix,hack, |
| 10:49 | agraf> | Ke: it's not something you want to "fix" |
| 10:49 | Ke> | actually I prefer the portable location |
| 10:50 | agraf> | until you want to install multiple distros on one system |
| 10:50 | suihkulokki> | obviously we can make mcbin be like any other "special" arm board which works with "fixes" |
| 10:50 | suihkulokki> | but this hardware is nice enough that we can make it.. just work |
| 10:50 | agraf> | yup |
| 10:57 | Ke> | agraf: I use the portable location inf% more frequently than I do multiboot |
| 10:57 | agraf> | Ke: so the way we hacked things up in openSUSE is to detect whether EFI vars are supported at all |
| 10:58 | agraf> | Ke: basically checking if there are any variables |
| 10:58 | agraf> | Ke: that works well to distinguish between the edk2 vs U-Boot case |
| 10:58 | agraf> | Ke: and it's forward-compatible, because if ever anyone implements efi vars in U-Boot for specific boards, things will magically work |
| 10:59 | agraf> | Ke: but you don't a) derive from upstream behavior and b) allow for multi-OS installations |
| 10:59 | agraf> | Ke: if you really think that installing grub as removable by default is the better way to go, please fight that battle on the grub mailing list |
| 10:59 | agraf> | Ke: but don't hack up random distros |
| 11:00 | Ke> | I think I'll just do what I want and not bother distros about it |
| 11:02 | agraf> | oh, sure, in your local setup you can do whatever you like ;) |
| 11:06 | Ke> | I believe both dual+ -boot and portably installed operating systems are marginal use cases and it's expected that neither is streamlined |
| 11:06 | Ke> | though of course I use latter and not former and my use case is not the default |
| 11:07 | Ke> | I think dual boot pretty much died with virtualization |
| 11:16 | Ke> | agraf: btw. in this case efivars are there and you can set them, they are just volatile |
| 11:17 | Ke> | agraf: at least in the EFI shell |
| 11:17 | agraf> | Ke: depends on how you spawn your VM |
| 11:17 | Ke> | and yes, I explicitly set non-volatile efivars |
| 11:18 | agraf> | Ke: if you pass a separate vars space via -pflash efivars are non-volatile ;) |
| 11:18 | Ke> | hmm, does EFI know where to look then? |
| 11:19 | agraf> | yes |
| 11:22 | agraf> | Ke: http://www.linux-kvm.org/downloads/lersek/ovmf-whitepaper-c770f8c.txt |
| 11:23 | agraf> | Ke: that explains it quite well for x86, but the same ideas should also apply for arm VMs |
| 11:25 | Ke> | are you now talking about only vms or does this apply to real hw as well? |
| 11:34 | agraf> | in real HW you need to have some storage space for efi vars |
| 11:34 | agraf> | something that can be accessed (written to) while Linux is running |
| 11:35 | agraf> | so ideally a piece of hardware that is not controlled by Linux ;) |
| 11:35 | agraf> | on most systems you have SPI flashes for that, but a good number of SBCs don't have any |
| 11:39 | Ke> | I like devices that do not have fixed non-volatile storage |
| 11:40 | Ke> | it means they can't be bricked nor they can't have malware installed |
| 15:34 | suihkulokki> | https://people.debian.org/~riku/mcbin/ |
| 16:19 | rabeeh> | thx suihkulokki |