Bug#1112063: ITP: stubble -- UEFI kernel stub with device-tree loading capability

[Christopher Obbard <obbardc@debian.org>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Christopher Obbard <obbardc@debian.org>
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org, Christopher Obbard <obbardc@debian.org>, Tobias Heider <tobias.heider@canonical.com>

  Package name    : stubble
  Version         : v3
  Upstream Contact: Tobias Heider <tobias.heider@canonical.com>
  URL             : https://github.com/canonical/stubble
  License         : LGPL2.1
  Programming Lang: C
  Description     : UEFI kernel stub with device-tree loading capability

Small Linux kernel EFI boot stub bundling device trees, a CHID database
and the kernel. The stub finds a matching device tree based on CHIDs
generated from SMBIOS and loads it before executing the embedded
kernel.

Booting generic Distro images on ARM64 laptops is quite hard due to
(currently) no way to tell what hardware the image is running on, or to
load the correct device tree from the kernel.

Stubble aims to mitigate against this by loading the correct device tree
for the laptop at runtime.

This package will be useful to build ARM64 Debian images which
"just-work" on ARM laptops, specifically Qualcomm X-Elite laptops.

The package is already in Ubuntu, so the source will be taken from there
and cleaned up. I plan to maintain this in Debian with Tobias; for now
it will only be useful for custom images. It will need further support
to sign the stub (later) and further discussion if it should be included
in official ARM64 images.

I was thinking about eventually creating some ARM64 HW Support Team in
Debian to handle these kinds of issues.