Raspbian should build the debian-installer package

[Adam Smith]

Currently raspbian doesn't provide its own installation media. It relies on third parties providing custom installers or SD card images.

However, with minimum patching it is possible to get the debian-installer package to output something meaningful. I've done this with the netboot installer - see https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=195162

If you are interested I can provide the patches I used.

[peter green (plugwash)]

It would definitely be nice to actually see the patches.

IMO if this is going to be an official part of raspbian, then it needs to handle partitioning and firmware/kernel setup. I would also want to see a commitment to maintain it on an ongoing basis.

[Adam Smith (adamsmith)]

Suggesting a partitioning scheme is easy to do, and could be done by just modifying one file. Similarly, installing a kernel is fairly straightforward I think with the flash-kernel package. That already has a debian installer udeb.

The difficult bit is deciding on the partitioning scheme to use. I would be very much against continuing the vfat /boot partition. The rpi firmware partition should be mounted at something like /boot/firmware (which is what Ubuntu uses).

https://github.com/Jc2k/flash-kernel
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=735092

Are there plans to make the pi a subarch in debian?

[Craig Genner (cgenner)]

I recall that the vfat /boot partition is (was?) a requirement of the way the pi boots and reads the config.txt and kernel. This may have now changed?

I do find it useful to be able to edit the config.txt on machines that can't read ext linux file systems. I suspect this is case for quite a few people.

I guess that doesn't stop there being a raspberrypi raspbian built image with a vfat /boot, and a native rasbian built image without a /boot.

[Adam Smith (adamsmith)]

A fat partition is required, but it doesn't have to be mounted at /boot, and it doesn't need to contain kernels. It could have U-boot, grub2, or an efi bootloader on there for example.

IMO, if this is to be easily maintainable, then getting patches accepted into real debian is the way to go. All that then would be required is to use the raspbian keyring.

My preferred method is grub2 (no removing of sd cards!), but I understand that is too much for some people, and I'm not that bothered to argue for it.

[Adam Smith (adamsmith)]

Debian seems to be doing stuff through hooks in the raspi3-firmware package. They copy kernels to /boot/firmware this way and generate config.txt and cmdline.txt files through this mechanism. That's a bit rubbish if you want to change the defaults, plus you just end up with duplicate copies of all the kernels.

Also, if I'm reading this correctly https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/libdebian-installer.git/tree/src/system/subarch-arm-linux.c , the addition of new subarches in armhf is discouraged.

[Adam Smith (adamsmith)]

Somebody else has pointed out that the raspi3-firmware package is overwriting user configs - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=848101 . They didn't fix the problem.

[Adam Smith (adamsmith)]

Example of how to automate the debian installer for the pi https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=216079&p=1328882#p1328882