Hello Installer and Kernel teams. It is now possible to boot d-i using UEFI HTTP boot. No need to copy the ISO to a USB stick or configure DHCP and PXE or similar netboot setups, just specify the ISO URL in your firmware configuration.
For Tianocore the procedure is as follows: Device Manager -> Network Device List -> (choose device) -> HTTP Boot Configuration -> Boot URI -> (add ISO URL) Save and go back to the main menu, then: Boot Manager -> UEFI HTTP A few caveats: - Notice the missing "s" in "UEFI HTTP boot". Only plain HTTP is supported, not HTTPS. - HTTP redirects, either 301 or 302, are also not supported. This means that [1] does not work, whereas [2] does. - Not a lot of UEFI implementations support this yet. Tianocore does, and I've heard modern Dell, Lenovo and HP systems do too. The missing pieces to get this working were: - Adding pmem modules to the installer initrd [3] (Kernel 6.12.13-1) - Recognizing pmem devices in list-devices-linux [4] (debian-installer-utils 1.152) Thanks to ukleinek, carnil, and Sledge for reviewing and merging the patches. ema [1] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso [2] http://chuangtzu.ftp.acc.umu.se/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso [3] https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/merge_requests/1167 [4] https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer-utils/-/merge_requests/14
