[restored various CCs as I think most of the people in the conversation aren't on qemu-discuss]
On Thu, 4 Dec 2025 at 09:30, Jakob Bohm via <[email protected]> wrote: > On 02/12/2025 06:57, [email protected] wrote: >> On Mon, Dec 01, 2025 at 01:36:03PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: >>> I do not think raspi.debian.net is any longer of service to Debian, and if >>> nobody steps up for it soon, I think I will retire it. >> So let's try -- I'd, of course, welcome any help (those shoes are so big, >> I could completely fit in one of them :) > > Given that the Raspberry Pi is one of the well known hardware designs > that are mostly built around running Debian, it would be sad for the > ecosystem if Debian support went away. > > Since the modern Pi hardware versions (such as Pi 4) are well known > entities with more detailed hardware specs than the partially > proprietary original Pi hardware, it would make more sense for Qemu > to grow the missing hardware emulation than for the OS images to be > changed to run on incompatible qemu hardware as well as real Pi > hardware. If people are interested in doing this work, on the QEMU side we would be happy to review and accept the patches. The main reason the raspi machines in QEMU are missing functionality etc is that nobody is currently actively working on them. (Raspi QEMU support is not something any commercial entity cares to pay people to work on, so it is in the "things people do in their free time if they want to" bucket, and I think that in general most people are happy with "run on the real hardware" for workloads that care about the underlying hardware and "run on QEMU virt board" for workloads that are just "I want some kind of aarch64 Linux guest".) For instance there are patches for the raspi4 that do things like enabling PCI, which are not upstream because the original submitter didn't have the time/resources to work through the issues/queries raised in code review. Somebody could take those over and work on getting them in. This patchset from early 2024 is the "full raspi4b machine", of which we took some patches, but the rest needed more work: https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/[email protected]/ thanks -- PMM
