The Raspberry Pi 3 is a version of the RaspberryPi which was released in February 2016. It contains a 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU and hence is the first version of the RaspberryPi to support the arm64 architecture.
Debian stretch runs on the Raspberry Pi 3 as soon as the following blockers are out of the way:
845488 (ITP: linux-firmware-raspi3 package)
845439 (vmdebootstrap: don’t enforce (U)EFI on arm64)
845526 (vmdebootstrap: allow users to create the boot directory path)
Once the above blockers are fixed, there are still a couple of known issues:
- There is no signal on the HDMI output. The image was tested via the serial port.
- The smsc95xx USB ethernet driver does not use the smsc95xx.macaddr= kernel parameter which the Raspberry Pi bootloader specifies. Hence, on every boot you will have a different MAC address, resulting in new IP addresses if you use DHCP/SLAAC.
- When using u-boot as bootloader, u-boot correctly fills the device tree with the MAC address, which the smsc95xx driver will pick up.
Eric Anholt says https://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg559387.html might be required to make that work.
upstream issue: https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/613
The Wifi and Bluetooth modules are not currently supported. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5etq3t/suse_releases_first_64bit_linux_os_for_raspberry/dagt12p/ says we need bcm2835-mmc for the second SD controller and use pinctrl to swap the busses.
- On boot, the initrd tries to do a file system check but fails because it cannot find fsck.ext4. Later on, systemd actually starts a working file system check, so this is more of a cosmetic issue.
Asked on #debian-systemd: neither in https://bugs.debian.org/src:initramfs-tools nor in https://bugs.debian.org/src:systemd can i find a bug report about both fsck'ing the rootfs unconditionally (the former in https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/kernel/initramfs-tools.git/tree/scripts/functions#n416, the latter in systemd-fsck-root.service). which one should be kept?
- Images built with vmdebootstrap don’t automatically expand to use all of the available SD card space.
stapelberg@ has a pending proposal to address this: https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-raspi-maintainers/Week-of-Mon-20170213/000037.html
- When updating the initramfs only (not the kernel), the new initramfs is not copied from /boot to /boot/firmware automatically
The hardware still need a non-free binary blob to boot (included in the linux-firmware-raspi3 package). A free software replacement is being worked on.
Any help on these issues is very welcome!
Preview image
To install the (unofficial, unsupported!) preview image on the SD card /dev/sdb, use:
$ wget https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/raspberrypi3/2016-11-24-raspberry-pi-3-stretch-PREVIEW.img $ sudo dd if=2016-11-24-raspberry-pi-3-stretch-PREVIEW.img of=/dev/sdb bs=5M
The root password is “raspberry”.