[U-Boot] [PATCH] sunxi: Machine id hack to prevent loading buggy sunxi-3.4 kernels

[Ian Campbell]

On Mon, 2015-03-02 at 00:07 +0200, Siarhei Siamashka wrote:
> Just one suggestion. It would be really nice if the Debian installer
> could present itself on all the available consoles, so that the user
> can use any of them for providing input to the installer.

There is some reason why d-i doesn't do this by default. I think it's to
do with bricking or otherwise interfering with devices attached to
serial ports e.g I think Braille terminals were mentioned, but I suppose
any random device might not like getting random strings of characters.

> Otherwise there will be a need to provide separate SD card images for
> the HDMI console (for the Raspberry Pi wannable competitors), the UART
> serial console (A10/A20 development boards without HDMI) and the USB OTG
> serial gadget console (for the tablets without HDMI). Instead of just
> having only a single SD card image to handle everything automatically.

I've backported DT the /chosen/stdout-path support to the kernel a while
ago and I thought together with Hans' u-boot patches to populate this
field with the right thing then console selection would Just Work(tm).

At least for HDMI vs. UART since I'm not quite sure how the OTG gadget
console is presented to Linux and whether it falls into this stuff
correctly.

> Oh, and one more suggestion. The SD card partitioning could be also
> improved in order to make it more user friendly. Right now the user may
> be confused by the Debian installer regarding what to do with the
> existing partition on the SD card (yes, it can be safely erased since
> the installer is running from RAM and does not rely on the data from
> that partition anymore).

I leave this one to Karsten who looks after the SD card images.

Ian.