Gunnar Wolf: Finally some light for those who care about Debian on the Raspberry Pi

Finally, some light at the end of the tunnel!

As I have said in this
blog
and elsewhere, after putting quite a bit of work into generating the Debian
Raspberry Pi images between late
2018
and 2023, I had to recognize I don’t have the time and energy to properly
care for it.

I even registered a GSoC project for it. I mentored Kurva Prashanth, who
did good work on the vmdb2
scripts we use for the image generation — but in the end, was unable to
push them to be built in Debian infrastructure. Maybe a different approach
was needed! While I adopted the images as they were conceived by Michael
Stapelberg,
sometimes it’s easier to start from scratch and build a fresh approach.

So, I’m not yet pointing at a stable, proven release, but to a good
promise. And I hope I’m not being pushy by making this public: in the
#debian-raspberrypi channel, waldi has shared the images he has created
with the Debian Cloud Team’s infrastructure.

So, right now, the images built so
far
support Raspberry Pi families 4 and 5 (notably, not the 500 computer I
have, due to a missing Device Tree, but I’ll try to help figure that bit
out… Anyway, p400/500/500+ systems are not that usual). Work is
underway to get the 3B+ to boot (some hackery is needed, as it only
understands MBR partition schemes, so creating a hybrid image seems to be
needed).

Sadly, I don’t think the effort will be extended to cover older,
32-bit-only systems (RPi 0, 1 and 2).

Anyway, as this effort stabilizes, I will phase out my (stale!) work on
raspi.debian.net, and will redirect it to point at the new images.