Package: installation-reports
Installation date: 2024-12-28
Installation image: debian-trixie-DI-alpha1-armhf-netinst.iso
Installation media: USB flash drive
Boot mode: U-Boot EFI on micro-SD card (no EFI boot variables)
Target: Olimex A20-OLinuXIno-LIME2 (Allwinner A20 ARMv7 SoC)
Tasksel selected options: SSH server, standard utilities
The overall installation was successful.
Observations:
1) The installer GRUB menu is displayed in text mode and is ugly (border
characters are messed up) and slow (like a 9600 bps serial tty). The
board supports graphic mode with the GOP driver which is much prettier
and faster.
One might argue that not all armhf boards may support graphic mode but
why then does the installed /etc/default/grub generate a graphic boot menu ?
2) The default disk label (partition table) type defined in
partman-partitioning for architecture armhf/efi is "gpt", but the GPT
primary table (ending at sector 34) overlaps U-Boot SPL (starting at
sector 16), making the system unbootable.
Unless the default disk label type is overriden by preseeding
partman-partitioning/default_label to "msdos", this makes guided
partitioning using the entire micro-SD card or creating a new partition
table on the micro-SD card in normal (non-expert) install unusable.
What about changing the default disk label type for armhf/efi to "msdos"
if the disk is a SD/MMC device (/dev/mmcblk*) ? Fortunately,
partman-auto now supports creating the EFI partition on MSDOS disk label
too.
3) The LPAE kernel flavour (linux-image-armmp-lpae) is not present in
the netinst image any more, probably because of size constraints. It was
available in debian-12.8.0-armhf-netinst.iso. Not really an issue on
this board with only 1GiB RAM but could be on systems with more than
4GiB RAM.
4) As expected, grub-installer detects that EFI boot variables are not
available and prompts whether to use the removable media path and update
NVRAM variables even in normal (non-expert) install. Selecting "yes" for
removable media path and "no" for NVRAM results in a bootable system.
