[Freedombox-discuss] Testing ODroid-XU4 Notes

[Sunil Mohan Adapa]

On 09/05/2016 12:57 AM, Nick Daly wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> Recently, I bought an ODroid XU4 to test as a FreedomBox.  I was
> originally going to buy one of the boards from the Parallela project,
> but they seem to have wrapped up.  16 or 128 cores might be the wrong
> focus for a personal web-server, anyway.  Below are my notes on
> testing with the ODroid.

Thanks for the awesome work and this report.

> 
> 
> 1 Equipment
> ===========
> 
>   All equipment purchased through ODroid's American distributor,
>   ameridroid.com:
> 
>   - The [ODroid-XU4] seems sturdy and fast.  Really nice hardware.
>     The hardware isn't completely free, as it seems to be in a similar
>     situation to the Raspberry Pi's proprietary display driver.  You
>     don't need to use the graphics card during normal operation, but I
>     believe the binary blob does need to be installed to boot the
>     device.  Grumble.

It looks like the boot process seems to be like this: SOC ROM -> bl1 ->
bl2 -> uboot -> trustzone stuff -> uboot script -> kernel [1][2].

For both XU3 and XU4:

- The Debian armmp kernel seems to have support.
- The u-boot-exynos package from Debian seems to support XU3 and XU4.
- flash-kernel has support for creating u-boot scripts for XU3/XU4
(which are actually generic).

It looks like Debian bits are all there and we need bl1, bl2 and
trustzone binaries to boot[3].  However, there may be hope for it as the
original reference implementation is free software[4].  We can check
with #debian-boot folks for more information on how they are using the
XU4 support added to u-boot.

> 
> 4 Summary
> =========
> 
>   Overall, I'd give this hardware a B.  It could be freer and a lot
>   easier to set up (and would be with a FreedomMaker image), but it
>   seems quite speedy and powerful for the price.
> 

Given the above boot situation, it should be fairly straight forward to
add support for freedom-maker to build XU4 images (except for pulling 3
boot blobs from outside).  We can discuss this further if you are
interested.

Links:

1)
http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:exynos4412bootsequence#odroid-x_x2

2)
http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:xu3_partition_table#ubuntu_partition_table

3)
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/u-boot.git/tree/doc/README.odroid

4) https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware

-- 
Sunil

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