Bruno Forcier's picture
Bruno Forcier - Fri, 2015/02/13 - 20:22

Hi,

Are there any plans to port tkdev to Raspbian so certain appliances could be created for deployment on Rasberry Pi 2?

Since the latest edition of this SoC is rather powerfull for the price, I see a lot of linux services benefitting from running on Pi 2 from a cost/performance standpoint.

Down the road, what could be even more awesome is creating a custom Noobs starter image (to be cloned to a MicroSD card) that would point to the turnkey images on startup to let the user select which Turnkey appliance he'd like to deploy.

Is there interest from Turnkey community to help out develop this?

Thanks

 

 

Forum: 
General
Tags: 
appliance
port
tkdev
rasberry pi
Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Mon, 2015/02/16 - 23:02

Although we'll probably support RPi1 first. Once we have that though I imagine that support for RPi2 would be relatively easy...

FWIW RPi2 doesn't need Raspbian - they should be able to run vanilla Debian armhf OOTB. Raspbian is an ARMv6 (RPi1 CPU arch) port of Debian armhf because the vanilla Debian armhf only supports ARMv7-A and later. The vanilla Debian armel arch will work with RPi1 but doesn't take best advantage of the hardware (so you lose performance - which the RPi1s can't really afford to lose...).

So although the RPi2 will still benefit from a custom kernel and will probably need some specific firmware; otherwise a default Debian armhf install should work fine...

Bruno Forcier's picture

Bruno Forcier - Mon, 2015/02/16 - 16:44

You say

FWIW RPi2 don't need Raspbian - they should be able to run vanilla Debian armhf OOTB.

Does it mean that I could run a turnkey installer ISO natively to deploy on a Pi 2?

Bruno Forcier's picture

Bruno Forcier - Mon, 2015/02/16 - 17:15

So as long as I use these ISOs

http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/7.8.0/armhf/iso-cd/

I should be fine?

Thanks!

 

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Mon, 2015/02/16 - 23:15

I have done some further research and it seems that my initial assumptions (and my post above) were only vaguely correct. In reality it seems that it's actually not quite that simple. Because the nature of the RPi2 is somewhat similar (to the original RPi) it still requires the binary blob to boot (Debian doesn't and won't include that as it is a pure proprietary binary for which there is no source code available).

So whilst in theory it should work fine; there is a fundamental piece missing that is required for booting...

Looking at this thread on the RaspberryPi Foundation forums it seems that there is little advantage to be had from running vanilla Debian too. So in many respects it may be that besides a specific kernel and firmware running Raspbian on the RPi2 may actually be an ok option...!?

However I note that this blog post provides a download far a (sort of) vanilla (plus RPi2 specifics) Debian armhf Jesse (still currently in testing) image to run on RPi2.

So sorry to lead you up the garden path a bit on this one... So my suspicion is that once we have a RPi build of TurnKey available then they will have this sorted out a bit better and (hopefully) it will also run on the RPi2...

Probably your best bet is to head over to the Raspbian forums and get the low down there. They're generally pretty friendly and helpful and there is some smart cookies that know their stuff (and will probably give you better RPi specific advice than me!

Bruno Forcier's picture

Bruno Forcier - Mon, 2015/02/16 - 23:35

Looking forward for the RPi build of Turnkey!

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