Dockstar and Debian armhf port?

I read about http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort but cannot see Dockstar as supported device. Tried to search information about it's processor, but found only info on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug that this one is ARM9, which should be supported, as it is ARM9. Can you confirm that Dockstar with Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l) will run armhf port?

From the Debian wiki page you linked to above:

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Currently the Debian armhf port requires at least an ARMv7 CPU with Thumb-2 and VFP3D16.

Dockstar, as you noted above, is Marvell Feroceon 88FR131 (usually just known as Kirkwood) processor. As you posted above it is ARMv5l architecture. ARM hard float basically refers to VFP instruction set. VFP2 was optional in ARMv5, but rarely used. VFP3 was introduced in ARMv7 Cortex series ARM cores. That, and newer, is the only hard float supported by any distro. The most common Cortex core is the Cortex-A9. You probably confused the A9 name with ARM9 architecture, which is the obsolete, slow and crappy old Kirkwood core that you have in your Dockstar, and that I also have in my (unwanted) Dockstar, and in my dearly loved (for now) GoFlex Net's with SATA.

LIke the crappy and slow, but cheap, Raspberry Pi, our crappy old Kirkwoods are now obsolete (at least Kirkwood has an excuse - they are now too OLD). They are being quickly outrun by the billions of cheap ARMv7 cores, such as the $5 A13, that are being manufactured at a record pace. So, just like a 286 they are, or will be soon, unsupported by newer distro releases and will be quickly relegated to history and the rubbish bin.

So yes, I can confirm that the Dockstar, with the Marvell Kirkwood Feroceon 88FR131, will not run the Debian armhf port, nor will it run any recent Ubuntu ARM distribution, or any other newer distro that needs ARMv7.

If you want to run a newer distro, then get a newer cpu. . .

Thanks for clarification. I was surprised when I found information about ARM9 and Sheeva, but ARM processor numeration seems to be more complicated than x86. I wish flags were enough... Is there any source where I can learn to translate for example A10 to ARMx? I found http://www.arm.com/products/processors/index.php but it doesn't help to clarify which version is A10 mentioned on http://gooseberry.atspace.co.uk/?page_id=13 and if it will be capable to run armhf architecture.

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Is there any source where I can learn to translate for example A10 to ARMx?

I don't understand what you are asking there. . . but I think what you mean is how to locate the arch. The specs for the SoC always list the arch such as ARMv5 or ARMv7. ARMv7 or later is what you are looking for to have hw float (VFP).

You are correct, however. There are a lot of different ARM platforms, not to mention the old stuff like big endian ARM. It used to be on Debian that there were ports for both big endian and little endian (armel) ARM platforms. At least we don't need to deal with that anymore! Everything now is armel. But there are now versions for ARMv5 and ARMv7. Arch and Debian are good examples of distros that have both ports. Ubuntu, as noted above, has settled on ARMv7. I think Fedora is all ARMv5 still. Until your post I did not realize there was an ARMv7 version of Debian. Thank you for that info. I will try to use that version on my A10's.

The Allwinner A10 is a new SoC. It was just released late last year. So it is ARMv7 based. It has a MALI400 GPU, which is very powerful, as an added bonus. Since it is ARMv7 with VFP3 it runs armhf and Ubuntu just fine.

But the Gooseberry is very much like the Raspberry. While both sound tasty at first bite they quickly begin to sour. They both have a fairly low starting price, but a LOT of negatives. Both are missing a case. You must "register your interest" for both to buy them. But at least you might actually be able to buy a Gooseberry as they are "coming." Neither are quite there yet. . .

Both are missing SATA ports. Both are actually WAY overpriced (if that is possible) for what you (don't) get. Both seem to follow the practice of other "development" boards in being only a bare board at a relatively high price. Neither screw you as bad as a Beagleboard, and personally I would prefer a Beagleboard to those two, but the Beagleboard price is just stupid. Fortunately there are MUCH better alternatives.

The Gooseberry is just a bare A10 tablet board without the shell and the LCD. It still even has the LCD connector and the buttons! Why in the world would anyone buy a bare Gooseberry board for £40 ($62 USD / €50 ) when you can get an entire A10 tablet for nearly the same price? If you do not want the touchscreen you can always sell it ;) My Eken T01, like most A10 tablets, has HDMI, USB OTG, USB mini and micro SD. It is identical to all the other A10 devices in that it can boot from either flash, SD, or USB, and just like the Gooseberry it can't be bricked unless you drop an actual brick on it. Even then I think that it would hold up better than a bare tablet PCB. . .

If you don't want a tablet there are other A10 alternatives. There is the MK802 shown here. It is smaller and more portable than either the Raspberry or the Gooseberry, and it has 1GB RAM. BTW, I am posting from the Ubuntu LXDE image available there that is running from the SD card on my Eken tablet. But the MK802 on that site is way, way overpriced, and the Ubuntu image they have is from somebody else.

Besides the "other" alternatives to a Dockstar/GoFlex/Pogoplug there are also better and more cost effective choices. For example, if you like the MK802 then why not just buy it on Aliexpress where Miniand probably gets it? If you want Gooseberry then get an A10 tablet there and sell the LCD.

But, if you don't need a tablet or a portable PC, and you want the best A10 device, then get a Mele A2000 box from Tom Cubie Tom is the guy that first released the A10 Ubuntu image. He also has helped the open source community by working with Allwinner to get the source code released. He is working constantly to help update kernel patches and code. He only sells these boxes in his spare time, and ships them out once a week. The Mele box is the best deal. Besides Debian and Ubuntu Android 4.0 will be available soon for it also. It will play 1080p video perfectly just like my tablet. But it looks better next to the TV. It may not have as much memory as the MK802, but it has SATA, TOSlink and an easily accessible serial port for playing around with Uboot. MIne is on order and was shipped out today. I look forward to having what is probably THE best ARM Linux development box available. The Mele box would probably make for a nice little low-power server, too.

I just found out that the Raspberry Pi Broadcom SoC uses ARM11 core with ARMv6 architecture. It has limited VFP support that is in between ARMv5 and ARMv7. It is not supported by Ubuntu or Debian armhf. But there is a guy that is taking the time to build a Debian hard float distro specific to the RasPi. Funny that he is using a Mele box to do so.

I apologize the the Raspi people for getting that wrong. When I was lurking on the Raspi forums a few months back that information was not available.

@gnexus

Thanks for sharing this Allwinner A10 info. It is very appealing to someone who looking for a <$100 Linux box that is capable to be a main mediaplayer in Home Theater (I would say a lot of us here are interested). With XBMC, I imagine it will play everything you'd throw at it? I think the RasPI is a little under power for such task.

I would suggest you create a new thread for this Allwinner A10 so we can follow your experience on this a little better? TIA.

-bodhi

Thanks for sharing knowledge. I wish you run blog or service about it, because most people - including me - can't get whole image of situation, even if they know about separate devices. For example I knew about Mele A1000 (which technically is just A2000 with half of flash) and A2000 (which was more expensive), but didn't know if it's capable to run Linux. Nice and pretty cheap option is some moment was Toshiba AC-100 netbook, which was also ARM based, had build in screen and keyboard (which always is good, unless someone need very small device) and lot of RAM, but had pretty limited Linux support (Ubuntu only, custom kernel, problems with sound and stability). But most people are not aware that there's platform difference between products, so they just compare GHz. They also are not sure, if all A10 devices are the same - some have ethernet port, some have VGA, some HDMI. Will all always this run under Linux for example on A10?

Anyway I totally agree with you - it's better to pay slightly more and get better platform. So it would be great to have a page (a table?; smth like http://www.linux-laptop.net/ ) where anyone can compare supported distros, issues, I/O ports and so on, as different people have different needs. There's a hype about Raspberry Pi right now, which IMO has positive effect, as many people will learn about ARM devices (I like ARM because it's affordable and uses much less power). But it has also drawback - if the people will know only obsolete platform, without case and lot of hacking reqiured, it may be very bad for ARM's future. We may end up in situation similar to Linux one: "Linux is difficult, Linux is for hackers", so Linux people will afraid of ARM devices.

One word of explaination: right now I have Dockstar running Debian as a router + personal server (shell for IRC and Jabber, personal, temporary WWW) and I'm happy with it. Don't need SATA, as 2,5" disc is connected on USB and runs fine. I needed ethernet port, and wanted to have easy access to lots of software. I could use some router with *WRT, but there's not so much software, and they usually have very limited resources. Also, routers with USB ports were pretty expensive at that moment (if avaliable) and probably not so well supported/described.

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I would suggest you create a new thread for this Allwinner A10 so we can follow your experience on this a little better? TIA.
-bodhi

I put one post on the Uboot section here. That started as really only a basic thanks to davy and Jeff for their Uboot stuff. But my main reason for compiling Uboot, now that davy released his new version, was to make sure that I the build for the A10 would work. The post got larger and OT when the Uboot build worked, so I politely moved it to a new thread.

The A10 is so new there is very little info on getting it to work with std. GNU/LInux like Debian. Much of the stuff on it is for Android, and the Ubuntu build was only released by hipboi (Tom Cubie) very recently. So far that seems to be the only build that works. There are instructions at rhombus-tech on doing a Debian bootstrap, but I still can't get my Debian to work. My situation is currently very limited, as I only have the tablet. There is no Uboot or kernel output during boot. All you can get is HDMI output once X has started. I am currently using ssh to get into Ubuntu and bootstrap Debian armhf. But there is no way to change the Uboot environment except to recompile it, so you can't even edit the kernel args. Even recompiling Uboot after changing the kernel args does not work. It keeps booting to the Ubuntu partition instead of the Debian one even after the root device was changed from /dev/mmcblk2 to /dev/mmcblk3. Very strange. I am still waiting on the Mele box.

A10 discussion is currently done on IRC at arm-netbook and various web pages. What is needed is a good forum where interested people can centralize the discussion. A wiki is also needed. There is so much work that still needs to be done that a single thread is not adequate. An A10 Uboot thread and a Debian thread are needed at a minimum. Almost nothing will apply to kirkwood. I don't want to get people here confused or off-topic. So it should really be in a separate forum.

I could post a page on my site. But my time would be better spent working on getting a Debian armhf rootfs image to distribute, and on getting Uboot and the kernel cleaned up. So I would rather post here if possible.

@Jeff
Would you be willing to create a sub-forum specifically for A10?

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For example I knew about Mele A1000 (which technically is just A2000 with half of flash) and A2000 (which was more expensive),

No. They are identical except for the case.

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Thanks for sharing knowledge. I wish you run blog or service about it, because most people - including me - can't get whole image of situation, even if they know about separate devices.

Neither can I. . .

As I stated above I could post a page or a blog on my site, or even create a forum. It would probably be very popular. But that is not my thing. I really don't want to do that. If I start on that then it would take time that would be better spent getting Linux to work. My main goal is to get MythTV frontend working on the Mele and my tablet. Current A10 Linux support is poorly documented and very limited (for example the git kernel source I cloned had two full Android rootfs in it! WTF?). That needs to be corrected. Otherwise the A10 experience will make a crappy RasPi experience look like paradise. If that happens only Android, iOS, and Win8 will benefit. Everyone else will lose out big time.

I've created a new 'Platforms' subforum with A10 and Kirkwood forums. Enjoy :)

Awesome Jeff.

Maybe also put an 'other' section for folks to see what stuff others wind up playing with.

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I've created a new 'Platforms' subforum with A10 and Kirkwood forums. Enjoy :)

Ooohhh!

AWESOME!

Now I have a good place to collate all the A10 information I have so far. That will greatly help me and others.

Prepare for a FLOOD of A10 information!

Link to the new A10 subforum is here.

Please do not discuss the A10 in other forums on this site. That helps everybody.

Jeff Wrote:
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> I've created a new 'Platforms' subforum with A10
> and Kirkwood forums. Enjoy :)

Thank you :-)