Banana Pi BPI-R4 support?

Banana Pi BPI-R4 support?

[Attila Lendvai]

dear Guix,

i'm hoping to run Guix on this Arm Corex-A73 board:

https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4

MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880)

i'm clueless about how to add support for a new platform to guix, but i'm experienced in guile, and in hacking near the metal.

with that in mind: how hard/hopeless would this task be? both 1) technically (if we ignore any possible use of blobs), and also 2) regarding the FSDG standard?

i don't see any mention of MT7988A here:

https://trustedfirmware-a.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
https://review.trustedfirmware.org/admin/repos/TF-A/trusted-firmware-a,general

i'd appreciate some bird's eye view insights before i get lost in a pointless struggle.

-- 
• attila lendvai
• PGP: 963F 5D5F 45C7 DFCD 0A39
--
“Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.”
	— Graham Greene (1904–1991)

Re: Banana Pi BPI-R4 support?

[Wilko Meyer]

Hi Attila,

Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name> writes:
> MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880)

I don't know too much about the Filogic 880, but from my experience the
number of SBC platforms that work entirely on free software is sadly
pretty sparse.

> with that in mind: how hard/hopeless would this task be? both 1)
> technically (if we ignore any possible use of blobs), and also 2)
> regarding the FSDG standard?

Technically it *could* be as easy as easy as building an image around a
custom u-boot variant package and a linux-libre-arm64-generic kernel
package. There are some examples for this in the gnu/system/images
(rock64 and some other iirc) and gnu/system/examples (for beaglebone
black at least) tree of guixes repository for reference. Realistically
my guess would be that you'd run into firmware/binary blob issues and
GNU FSDG issues rather quickly.

-- 
Kind regards,

Wilko Meyer
w@wmeyer.eu