Some beginner process questions

[Electr1]

welcome aboard @art44,

@art44

I notice there is just one Debian image on dl.khadas.com which is a release candidate from September. There are more images for Ubuntu but a lot of those are pretty old too. What drives when new images are posted to dl.khadas.com and how are those likely to compare with the ones I would build myself? Have the ones on dl.khadas.com gone through any more testing?

yup, those images are a bit old, but you can build a new image with fenix script:

GitHub - khadas/fenix: One-stop script set to build Ubuntu/Debian images

@art44

I’d really like to understand more about what Fenix is doing and the boundary between Fenix and Ubuntu. Are there any posts or other documentation on the design or structure of Fenix or is it just a question of diving into the source?

fenix is just a simple script for building Ubuntu and Debian images, you can build the firmware from source as well, but fenix helps save time and builds the entire firmware on the spot (remember to use fenix, you need a host linux computer)

@art44

I’m a bit bothered by the fact that building an image needs root on the host computer (and that even the docker container needs privelged execution, sysadmin capability, and loop control on the host). Is there a quick answer for why is this needed?

presumably because it will require the need to root permissions for building the kernel and rootfs, you can ask @numbqq and @Frank more about this if you like,

@art44

I found this post noting that PCIe had been disabled on Linux 5.x and it scared me a bit. Is there a chance I might one day do an update and have some driver I was depending on be disabled? Is there a page summarizing the current status of each driver in each kernel or something else that I should be checking before updates?

that was a very long time ago, PCIe works again, please note if you need to use an SSD, you need to use one of the tested compatible SSDs

cheers