Re: The state of Arm64 on Raspberry Pi (and its Documentation
Hi Ralph,
On 2020.03.31 15:24, Ralph Aichinger wrote:
Is there some "official" Debian documentation on how to
install aarch64 Debian on the Pi 3 or 4 in an "official" (i.e.
diverging as little as possible from Debian standards) way?
Not from Debian (AFAIK) but, for the Pi 3, you will find some posts on
the Raspberry Pi forums:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=249449&sid=beb9a5a5fc456deef7c00f1ffc0be1df
as well as a corresponding blog post at
https://pete.akeo.ie/2019/07/installing-debian-arm64-on-raspberry-pi.html.
I am the author of both these posts.
For the Pi 4, the situation is a bit more tricky (see below).
Does installing Debian on top of UEFI firmware work yet
in practice
It does. Pi 3 in full UEFI mode should not be much of an issue if you
follow the guides I pointed to.
Pi 4 is a bit more problematic because the most *CRUCIAL* factor is that
we are missing a working network driver in Debian, which makes netinst a
very dicey issue.
I have tried to bring attention to it a few times (the thing is, Debian
10.3.0 *could* have had a working network driver for the Raspberry Pi 4,
so that folks could perform netinst from vanilla ISOs), but, unless I am
very mistaken and the next Debian *installer* uses a 5.6 kernel, I don't
think the Debian maintainers have quite yet grasped that the genet ACPI
driver *must* be retrofitted into the Debian 4.x kernel if they want Pi
4 installation support.
See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=950578
https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Platform/RaspberryPi/RPi4
or should I start from somewhere else?
The more appropriate place to start is: https://github.com/pftf/RPi4
which provides regularly updated *EXPERIMENTAL* UEFI firmware images for
the Pi 4.
Using such an image, you can pretty much get Debian installed on a USB
flash drive, as you would do on a regular x86 UEFI based PC, along with
networking if you manage to update your kernel to very latest. But,
again, the main issue right now is that, unless the installer's image
kernel is patched, you will sadly not be able to perform a netinst, so
you have to jump through a few annoying hoops to get networking.
The one things that need to be pointed out are:
- You will be limited to 3 GB of RAM on 4 GB models (requires a kernel
patch such as the one from https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/issues/20 to be
upstreamed)
- You will not get SD card support in Linux, because there again, an
ACPI driver is missing (https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/issues/26).
I do not need graphics, a purely headless setup is fine by me.
Graphics should work. Video acceleration is another story, but X run
without much trouble.
Is there some way for a somewhat experienced sysadmin to
help in documenting this stuff, trying out things, filing bugs, etc?
If you want to help, maybe report that the bug I pointed out above
affects you too, since, if you can live without SD support, it's pretty
much the one thing that stands in the way of being able to use the
vanilla netinst ISOs on the Pi 4.
I hope the tone of this message does not come across as demanding,
pushy or unfriendly, I really do appreciate all your work in
the arm port, I have been using arm devices as my servers at
home for years now, and I am very grateful that these devices
can run with a sane Debian based OS. But I think using
vanilla Debian on the Pi should be a lot easier than it is
now.
Amen!
We're doing what we can to make that happen on the UEFI side, and I
believe we are already there in terms of providing a usable means of
installing and running vanilla Debian on the Pi 4, at least from USB.
The only thing that's missing, really, is for Debian folks to integrate
the retrofitted Genet network driver, which we submitted 2 months ago,
in the vanilla aarch64 installation images...
Regards,
/Pete
Reply to: