Raspberry Pi, latest u-boot or Yocto LTS one?

Hi all,

We are currently moving meta-mender-raspberrypi out of meta-mender into meta-mender-community. This will decouple board integration maintenance and development from the core product, making it easier to move faster along with upstream. Which brings me to the question:

The PR adds a dependency on meta-lts-mixins for current u-boot. This is required for the Raspberry Pi 5, but the older ones could do without it. So I’m undecided which would be the best strategy.

  • use the meta-lts-mixins provided u-boot for all? Pro: unified build setup, contra: more complex setup for RPis up to 4.
  • use the meta-lts-mixins provided u-boot just for the boards unsupported in upstream poky? Pro: less dependencies, contra: variance between builds.
  • something completely else?

Thoughts @leon-anavi @moto-timo, and others?

Greets,
Josef

1 Like

I don’t really have a very informed opinion, but my gut feeling says it’s better to unify. The only thing that needs to be preserved is that environment tools (fw_setenv) need to work the same way, and write to the same environment location. This should keep upgrades working correctly. I’m thinking that everything else is better to unify to cut down on maintenance.

It might be good in the short-term to add it as something that could be marked only for Pi 5s, which might make it easier to integrate with OpenEmbedded upstream once their version catches up?

@kacf I think the environment tools work the same way as previous versions when I’ve been testing things so shouldn’t be an issue.

Hi @pyxlwuff,

The scarthgap release will never upgrade, so this would be permanent. We are not actively tracking the upstream here.

Greets,
Josef

Ah right in that case it’s probably best to unify it and provide it for all Raspberry Pi boards. How further complicated would pre-5 board setup become? Just thinking about what changes we might need to make in our environment

Hi @pyxlwuff,

The pre-5 setup would effectively not change if you’re using the kas files. It’s just one additional layer which is being cloned and used under the hood.

Greets,
Josef

2 Likes