[LetuxOS] LetuxOS: new updates

[H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Hi,
what is new this week?
Not much or a lot - depending on how you view it.

a) kernel 5.14-rc2 is built

and as usually a lot of stable / longterm kernels.
See: https://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-kernel/

b) i386/x86 version of LetuxOS kernel and debian images

I recently got an ACEPC T11 which is a small Z8350 based
machine - quite similar in number and type of interfaces
to a RasPi 3 or 4. Main difference is that it comes with
a case, i.e there is no RasPi Cape connector. But it has
an SCSI slot inside so there is room for a big HDD or SSD.

What I managed is to pull a bootloader/grub.cfg from a
Debian live stick and place it into our LetuxOS repository.

A fix to makesd allows to

	DEV=/dev/$some_usb_stick makesd -v latest x86 -r minimal

Well, only after cross-compiling a kernel for i386 and
debootstrapping some root file system.

The main challenge was to make the kernel find the usb
memory stick for booting... The first working kernel was
one where all =m CONFIGs were replaced by =y. This made
the kernel binary include all required device drivers plus
thousands of others. But it did now find the USB memory
as roots.

I have switched back many subsystems to =m because drivers
are rarely needed and can be loaded on demand, but there
are certainly some strange things inside. For example booting
stalls for 20 seconds waiting for some RAID device.

Anyways, starting with letux-5.14-rc2 there is now a build
for i386:

	https://download.goldelico.com/letux-kernel/latest-i386/

You may note that there is also an amd64 kernel package
but it is the same 32 bit kernel because I have to update
my cross-compiler first to include 64bit gcc and libs.

I hope you appreciate this work and maybe we can get
some desktop Replicant 4.2 running one day. Or QtMoko
and QuantumSTEP.

This would be close to the final dream of a single
distribution for desktop, notebook, tablet, smartphone,
SBC and embedded controller. No fihting with missing
packages here or there, different configs, strange
workarounds by device distribution maintainers etc.

Thats it for this week. Hopefully more next week.
I plan to look again into the SGX driver for the Pyra
which was reported to have failed with v5.8-rc1 and later.

BR,
Nikolaus