Hi Roger and all! On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 12:45:49AM +0300, Dmitry Baryshkov wrote: > > * non-free: > > - Software that runs on the host must go here > > - Firmware that runs on peripheral devices can go here, but should > > not because most Debian systems do not have this archive section > > enabled > > I've added Loïc, he has been looking at providing Debian images for those > boards. He might have suggestions regarding packages he might need for that > (or he might have some WiP with boot files). > > But as have had this question beforehand, I see a little value in packaging > BSP files (at least at this point). If you want to improve Debian support on > those boards, I'd really suggest looking at D-I or at sorting out dtb vs > bootloader situation (Christopher and I did a presentation at FOSDEM this > year).
Indeeed, I've literally discussed the same idea as what's proposed in this ITP with others in my team, but ended up deferring it :-) To echo what Ben and Dmitry wrote on boot firmware vs linux-firmware: - whenever possible, it's nicer to load firmware for peripherals when Linux is up, and then it should come through kernel-firmware/linux-firmware - in some cases, the firmware is running on peripherals but is loaded before Linux even starts; this is either due to architectural decisions/constraints, or signatures - for the Qualcomm IoT boards (which are originally Android designs), a few of these firmware have already been moved from boot firmware to linux firmware and have been contributed to kernel-firmware upstream; what we're seeing here is the remainder which can't be moved, at least in the short-term I'm guessing Roger is proposing this new source package as to be able to provide directly flashable images of Debian for these platforms – Roger, if you could share your high-level goals to confirm, that would be helpful to prioritize our options! I've started working on Debian images for Qualcomm IoT platforms earlier this year. This is where I'm keeping the debos recipes: https://github.com/qualcomm-linux/qcom-deb-images (I should mention Linaro has been building self-standing Debian-based flashable images ("rescue" images) for these platforms semi-regularly, and Mobian also seems to have some similar debos recipes!) The (currently slightly kludgy) boot firmware handling is here: https://github.com/qualcomm-linux/qcom-deb-images/blob/main/debos-recipes/qualcomm-linux-debian-flash.yaml#L85 The main thing I want to underline is that the input for images for the RB3 Gen2 boards are general purpose boot binaries for the QCM6490 platform and the board-specific CDT. IMHO, since these are UEFI (+ DT) capable platforms, Debian should focus on providing great support for UEFI images. I don't know if Debian should also ambition to package/host/build/distribute the mostly non-free boot firmware files, I can see how it would allow delivering rescue images or self-standing Debian images with boot firmware + OS, but another option is to leave the boot firmware to be distributed by Linaro/Qualcomm and focus the Debian efforts on the OS images. For QCM6490 specifically, I found that many things just worked with a plain Debian image. A few patches were already merged in trixie, some immediate gaps that we could focus on: 1) we don't have pre-installed UEFI images - only installer images - and it's not trivial to convince these platforms to boot to an installer on USB/SD / over the network; it would be great to have UFS-friendly (4k sector size) pre-installed Debian images that could be flashed with qdl on UFS LUN0 2) 6.12 doesn't work well on 6490, a few critical bug fixes went into 6.13 and 6.14; but recent kernels work great, so using linux from backports would be a good experience; perhaps we can identify select bug fixes to make 6.12 a least boot to upgrade to a new kernel 3) we need a mechanism to provide updated device trees from time to time on these platforms; systemd-boot lets one configure a per-board device tree override, or u-boot-efi-dtb will copy the DTBs to the ESP, but we probably want something friendlier out of the box (flash-kernel entries? GRUB default config as done in the Ubuntu images?) Best, -- Loïc Minier
