Re: News on Utilite?

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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On Mon, 2014-01-13 at 09:57 +0100, Christer Solskogen wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 6:49 PM, Michael Tremer
> <michael.tremer(a)ipfire.org> wrote:
> 
> > I wish I had good news for you, but unfortunately there has not been any
> > progress at all regarding Utilite support. However, there have been huge
> > advancements towards the unified ARM kernel and for the 2.15 release in
> > general.
> >
> 
> If IPFire would provide binaries for armv7 - you could, in theory, use
> the kernel from archlinux.
> CompuLab provides their own kernel source at
> https://gitorious.org/utilite which arch uses. So you can also cross
> compile the kernel if you like.

Unfortunately we cannot do that.

IPFire is built from source and there is a reason for it: We want to be
able to control what is enabled and what not. Especially in the kernel,
there is lots of stuff that we don't need and other stuff that we do
need, but which is often not enabled in the mainstream distributions.

This is for example networking features or very strong hardening which
is not very suitable on a desktop system. We apply grsecurity and more
things and we have our own hardened compiler.

Therefore we require the sources and we need to compile them ourselves.

Other distributions take arbitrary kernel images they found on they
Internet and bundle them with their userland and then claim to support a
certain board. But there are never updates, the kernel differs a lot
from the original distribution kernel, you never know if someone added
some malware - or added some patches that make the system insecure or
unstable - and there are so many other issues...

We simply cannot do this.

But currently, the kernel is not the issue here. I am confident that it
will run decently on the board. It just cannot be booted right now. And
that is a problem caused by uboot.

-Michael