Rasberry PI (RPI) support

[adrelanos]

It's possible. @Algernon-01 managed to implement it in @Whonix which is using grml-debootstrap. (https://github.com/Whonix/Whonix/pull/419)

In essence if I did not overlook something - deduction from theory (code reading):

• export DEBOOTSTRAP='qemu-debootstrap'
• export FSCK='no' (?) (Maybe @Algernon-01 can explain?)
• skip installation of grub (since it does not exist for that platform) - https://github.com/grml/grml-debootstrap/pull/113
• packages ((https://github.com/Whonix/anon-meta-packages/pull/11)): rpi-patches, wpasupplicant, firmware-iwlwifi, firmware-atheros, firmware-brcm80211, firmware-ralink, firmware-realtek, iw, fake-hwclock
• parted, mkfs stuff as per 2375_build_rpi_fs

Would be cool if grml-debootstrap supported RPI out of the box.

[mika]

Oh nice, sounds great and I'd definitely welcome to support that. :)

[Algernon-01]

Using qemu-debootstrap and skipping the installation of grub are the most important parts to build the image for the rpi. At least in this case a raw arm64 (and likely also other architectures) image can be build. The fsck step was not required. But I guess it can be put in again. For the rpi at least you always need two partitions. One FAT partition for the firmware, kernel, initrd and an ext4 partition for thr rootfs. I don't know if there will a generic debian package any time soon which has firmware for more than just the rpi. If just the rpi should be supported then this package would somehow need to be integrated: https://packages.debian.org/buster/raspi3-firmware . The version from stretch does not work, the rpi-patches package in Whonix is an adapted version from buster since I could not yet get the original version to boot without some modifications. iirc for buster there will be also official Debian images for the rpi. Development is happening here: https://github.com/Debian/raspi3-image-spec though they seem to use vmdb2 for building.

[mika]

JFTR, vmdb2 was orphaned "recently": https://tracker.debian.org/news/1004074/accepted-vmdb2-0132-2-source-all-into-unstable/

Is there any news from your side regarding buster support, @adrelanos + @Algernon-01?

[adrelanos]

I don't know much about it.

vmdb2 seems back to life?

• https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/vmdb2
• https://packages.debian.org/trixie/vmdb2

trixie has a newer version of vmdb2.

Potentially useful packages:

• https://packages.debian.org/stable/kernel/linux-image-rpi
• https://packages.debian.org/stable/raspi-firmware
• https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=firmware-brcm80211

It might be possible to extract the required packages, build commands from here somewhere:

• https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPiImages
• https://salsa.debian.org/raspi-team/image-specs
• https://github.com/emojifreak/debian-rpi-image-script
• https://github.com/gitbls/sdm
• https://web.archive.org/web/20230131025237/https://geoffhudik.com/tech/2020/04/27/scripting-raspberry-pi-image-builds/
• https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen

Needless to say that his is non-trivial.

This is the most comprehensive overview of different boot methods that I have found so far:

• https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi4