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Debian has a page for Raspberry Pi support,

However, their auto-built images don't list the Raspberry Pi 5 as a "family". Does the official Debian images for the raspberry pi support the Pi 5?

  • If so, should I download the image for the Pi 5 "family", or is there another place to get them?
  • If not, is there an issue tracker for Pi 5 support?
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  • what's wrong with Raspberry Pi OS? Commented Dec 17, 2023 at 7:08
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    "Debian has a page for Raspberry Pi support" -> They may, although I don't think so, and in any case that is not. The address is actually a debian.net subdomain, but "debian.net" does not really exist beyond that; Debian's real site is debian.**org**. If you look for "raspberry pi" using the search on the real site, a lot of stuff comes up, but none of it is a link to raspi.debian.net. Also, the fact that this is really just one person doing his/her own thing is spelled in the first question of the FAQ...
    – goldilocks
    Commented Dec 17, 2023 at 14:35
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    And finally, the site pages have a footer which explicitly states, "This site is not an official Debian project ... content herein provided should be considered unofficial". So those are really no more "official Debian images" than RpiOS is. WRT to Pi 5 support, presumably you'll have to wait until Gunnar has one to test on...
    – goldilocks
    Commented Dec 17, 2023 at 14:36
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    @goldilocks It's linked to from the wiki, wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPiImages Commented Dec 17, 2023 at 17:19
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    @goldilocks: debian.net is not debian.org, but such pages are allocated by Debian to Debian developers, often used to provide some unofficial services to Debian (many of them got later a .org), or as preview (possibly for other debian maintainer, to test ARM architecture). Commented Dec 18, 2023 at 14:19

2 Answers 2

4

As per my comments, there are no "official Debian images for the raspberry pi". The site you found, raspi.debian.net, is not part of the official Debian site, debian.org, and the notice in the page footers makes this explicit:

This site is not an official Debian project. While the maintainer (Gunnar Wolf) is a Debian Developer, content herein provided should be considered unofficial.

This does not mean there is anything wrong with the images, etc.,1 but it does simplify your question, because there are no Debian policies here to question or consult. There's just Gunnar Wolf's website, and since he has not updated it for the Pi 5, it's pretty unlikely that he has updated the images, and the "Download tested images" page makes that pretty clear.

However, since he autogenerates a set of images nightly, depending on how those are made, it is not impossible for them to include the necessary updates -- all that needs to be done is that the boot partition and kernel modules be copied from the Raspberry Pi git repo. That boot partition, is (minus some text files) the same as the one used with RpiOS, and suitable for all models.

Unfortunately though, the nightly build images from Gunnar are not. I downloaded the bookworm image for the Pi 4 and this is what's in the boot partition:

bcm2711-rpi-400.dtb*
bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb*
bcm2711-rpi-cm4-io.dtb*
bcm2837-rpi-3-a-plus.dtb*
bcm2837-rpi-3-b.dtb*
bcm2837-rpi-3-b-plus.dtb*
bcm2837-rpi-cm3-io3.dtb*
bcm2837-rpi-zero-2-w.dtb*
bootcode.bin*
cmdline.txt*
config.txt*
fixup4cd.dat*
fixup4.dat*
fixup4db.dat*
fixup4x.dat*
fixup_cd.dat*
fixup.dat*
fixup_db.dat*
fixup_x.dat*
initrd.img-6.1.0-16-arm64*
start4cd.elf*
start4db.elf*
start4.elf*
start4x.elf*
start_cd.elf*
start_db.elf*
start.elf*
start_x.elf*
sysconf.txt*
vmlinuz-6.1.0-16-arm64*

There's only one kernel and firmware set there, and they are explicitly for the Pi 4. Unless the Pi 5 can use them (which is unlikely), you are out of luck until Gunnar gets a Pi 5.


  1. It is referred to by the "Debian Raspberry Pi Maintainers" and in the Debian wiki,
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They've since added this to the FAQ,

When will there be support for the RPi5?

We need mainline Linux to be able to boot on a device before trying to support it in Debian. The Raspberry 5 family boots with a kernel that has many components not yet in mainline. We cannot plan for including RPi5 support at least until regular, upstream, mainline Linux kernels are able to boot on it.

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