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> The image will be archived in .rar format. RAR is used because it has a higher compression ratio than .zip, and .rar files can store full file permissions whi

by creshal 11y ago

> The image will be archived in .rar format. RAR is used because it has a higher compression ratio than .zip, and .rar files can store full file permissions while compressed. What is this, 1995?! (Oh, and it's super important to preserve the permissions of the ISO file you're dd'ing over the SD card…)

jxy 11y ago
This is the most bizarre thing in the article. On the other hand, what is the purpose of comparing the default installed packages on the distribution image? I thought there would be some useful performance comparisons, but there's none. Does the hardware require special driver to run Linux? So some distro would have the DMA bug and others don't? Or is it just those people are too lazy to upgrade their buggy drivers?
Esau 11y ago
More archaic are systems that don't support booting from installation media. I've noticed this is common on all the low-end boards like this. Why don't any of them support, say, booting installation media off a USB stick?
- dezgeg 11y ago
  Because these kinds of boards don't typically have BIOS/firmware chips, the booting options are limited to what is provided by the SoC's boot ROM. An USB host stack is immensely complicated and as such something that manufacturers wouldn't want to put in their ROMs (although I recall some Cortex-M0 chips actually implement this). Many (maybe even most?) SoCs, including at least all previous Allwinner chips do support booting directly from SD cards, though.
  - gcb0 11y ago
    ... flash a "boot from SD card filesystem" firmware in the factory?
    - dezgeg 11y ago
      No, the boot ROM supports from booting an SD card. Though not in the sense of booting any OS like Linux, but booting a board-specific second stage bootloader like U-Boot.