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 buster runs on the Raspberry Pi 3, but there are a few issues preventing us from releasing an official image:
vmdb2, the successor of vmdebootstrap, is not included in Debian yet.
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.
- With linux-image-4.13.0-1-arm64 4.13.4-1, the necessary SD controller changes are done.
We still need a kernel config change to set CONFIG_BRCMFMAC_SDIO=y, tracked in 877911
- Further, the required brcm/brcmfmac43430-sdio.txt seems to be missing from linux-firmware.git, and consequently from the firmware-brcm80211 Debian package. stapelberg@ contacted Arend van Spriel, one of the Broadcom developers, about this.
- stapelberg@ got “iwlist wlan0 scan” to work after addressing the items above.
Longer-term improvements:
The hardware still needs a non-free binary blob to boot (included in the raspi3-firmware 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/raspberrypi3/2017-10-08/2017-10-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img.bz2 $ bunzip2 2017-10-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img.bz2 $ sudo dd if=2017-10-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img of=/dev/sdb bs=5M
If resolving client-supplied DHCP hostnames works in your network, you should be able to log into the Raspberry Pi 3 using SSH after booting it:
$ ssh root@rpi3 # Password is “raspberry”