Hi Pabs, Just responding to the miniramfs and installer bits:
- 'miniramfs'[5] works around the limitation of some devices for which the initramfs size is constrained; it creates a minimal initramfs able to chain-load the actual initrd from the boot partition and transfer control to itWhich part of these devices is limiting the initramfs size? Is using the MODULES=dep initramfs small enough?
For the PinePhone Pro, the limiting factor is actually a bug causing compressed initramfs over ~40MB (gzip) to fail to decompress. I've had no luck finding the cause of the bug and osk-sdl (required for disk encryption) adds ~70MB to the initramfs on top of `MODULES=dep`.
For many ex-Android devices, the boot partition is a fixed size and quite small. For some it's so small that a standard initramfs wouldn't fit, but for most the osk-sdl issue above is more than enough to require this workaround. Miniramfs is then able to load a real initramfs from a reasonably sized /boot partition.
Unl0kr (https://gitlab.com/cherrypicker/unl0kr) replacing osk-sdl may help with this, but it's not ready currently and is difficult to package due to LVGL.
This is already needed for some laptops where the firmware isn't redistributable, and I think it might also be needed for Apple M1 devices, so I think it would be good to have a solution to this that can be used in d-i as well as in the mobile images. It would also be great if d-i could be run on mobile devices so that one can get fully LUKS encrypted systems.
This should be possible eventually. Mobian's installer and d-i both already use Calamares, though the Mobian installer loads a specific mobile module. I'm currently trying to get this module into Debian as `calamares-extensions` (https://salsa.debian.org/qt-kde-team/extras/calamares-extensions). This already supports LUKS on mobile devices.
Once that's done, I'd be happy to work with the d-i team to bring the two closer together.
Regards, Jarrah.