Hi All,
I'm just going to point out that there exists another way to boot into
the UI installer on RPi3, and perform an ARM64 Debian install in a
manner that is very close to what a user would perform on an x86 PC.
This is accomplished through the use of the official UEFI firmware that
now exists for the RPi3 [1], which greatly simplifies things and ensures
that you can get niceties such as a full UI GRUB on boot (where you can
edit boot options for instance) and other features that you'd expect to
find on a PC-like install.
Full installation of Debian 10 is actually documented in the official
EDK2 firmware repository [2] and you can find a ready to use UEFI binary
archive (that also includes the WLAN firmware binaries for use with
Linux) at [3].
The only gotchas that exist at the moment are that:
- The CD-ROM mount scripts have not been designed for FAT partition
usage on MMC (they don't look for install media on /dev/mmcblk# as they
do for /dev/sd# for instance, and they also appear to force the file
system type to read-only mount, which is a bit problematic)
- The installer partition manager is very picky with regards to what it
considers an ESP, whereas Raspberry Pi's can't use GPT partition scheme
or type 0xef with MBR due to the SoC's embedded bootloader limitations,
which may require a post-install fix if you don't create the ESP in a
manner that partition manager can be happy with.
Apart from that however, the installation process is fairly
straightforward and does provide a user experience that is almost
identical to the one you would see when installing Debian on a UEFI x86 PC.
So I just wanted to mention that the method being exposed below is not
the only one that currently exists to get to a fully working Debian 10
installer on the Raspberry Pi 3.
If you are interested in the UEFI installation method, you can also
additional walkthroughs at [4] (which is probably the most complete) and
[5].
Regards,
/Pete
PS: There is work currently going on to bring an UEFI firmware to the
RPI4, so that hopefully the same process can eventually be applied there
too.
[1]
https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Platform/RaspberryPi/RPi3
[2]
https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/blob/master/Platform/RaspberryPi/RPi3/Systems.md
[3] https://github.com/pbatard/RPi3/releases
[4]
https://pete.akeo.ie/2019/07/installing-debian-arm64-on-raspberry-pi.html
[5]
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=249449&sid=e7e3dcb4c42da263bdbe1c9661f21e61#p1523007
On 2019.11.05 05:20, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
basti dijo [Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 09:58:11PM +0100]:
Hello Mailinglist,
Hello Gunnar,
Hi, and thanks for the explicit mention :-]
I get the debian installer running on my rpi3.
This post is just to inform about the general possibility and for
documentation propose on debian wiki.
OK, this is quite exciting news! It's great to see the Raspberries
being closer to a first-tier architecture in Debian. TBH, I believe
for almost all RPi users it will be easier to use the installed images
— But yes, I can perfectly understand many will feel this to be better
and more official.
Given you already did all this legwork... Could you add this
information to the Wiki yourself? It's always better if the person
that did the work and has the hands-on knowledge does it.
test with arm64 mode on rpi3b+
you need:
- sdcard with binary blob vfat partition (I use it from
https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPiImages)
- usb stick for arm64 installer
todo:
- download arm64-netinstall iso
- copy iso to usb stick (cp debian-10.1.0-arm64-netinst.iso /dev/sdx)
- copy vmlinuz and initrd.gz from stick to sdcard
- edit config.txt to boot vmlinuz and initrd.gz
- insert sdcard and usb stick to raspi and start
Umh, this looks like quite a bit of "legwork". I understand you are
basically proving it is _possible_ to boot into d-i, but this all
should probably be prepared into a first-blob bit of a hybrid image:
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/arm64/ch04s03.en.html
- ignore missing firmware, brcmfmac43455-sdio.bin is wlan, can be
installed later (firmware-brcm80211)
AIUI, you can also drop this file in your USB drive and have it picked
up by the installer.
toto:
- not all languages are shown correctly in installer
This seems quite odd...
Thanks a lot!
