Re: Trusted Firmware-A (ARMv8)

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2022-10-24, Joshua Branson wrote:
> Kevin Vigouroux via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System
> distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> I would like to install Guix (System) on the Banana Pi M5 [0]. The
>> board is “open source” but not the firmware released by Amlogic [1].
>>
>> The platform (Amlogic Meson S905X3) is currently not supported by the open
>> source project Trusted Firmware-A [2][3].
>>
>> I am a user not an expert and I don’t know what to do.
>>
>
> This kind of question might get a better answer in help-guix@gnu.org.
> :)
>
> Well, if you are trying to preserve your computing freedom, you might
> need to ask how well will the board operate without the closed firmware.
>
> Will wifi work?  Probably not, but you can purchase usb wifi dongles.
>
> Will graphics work... I've no idea.

It is a signed boot firmware, so the board will not work at all without
it. I have managed to get other S905* boards to boot, but it requires
using the vendor-provided signing tools, which include some non-free
blobs. There were attempts to replace that functionality, but as far as
I know they are no longer active:

  https://github.com/afaerber/meson-tools
  https://github.com/angerman/meson64-tools

That particular SoC has not yet been ported to upstream
trusted-firmware-a (a.k.a. arm-trusted-firmware)... not sure how
difficult that would be.

So I don't hold my breath for something fully freedom-respecting from
that family of boards... even though you can probably build more of the
boot firmware from source than many systems people use regularly as they
don't build any part of their boot firmware... a messy world.


live well,
  vagrant

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