MiniDebConf Cambridge - 26th November 2023 - Afternoon sessions

That's all folks ...

Sadly, nothing too much to report.

I delivered a very quick three slides lightning talk on Accessibility, WCAG [Web Content Accessibility Guidelines] version 2.2 and a request for Debian to do better

WCAG 2.2:  WCAG 2.2 Abstract

Debian-accessibility mailing list link: debian-accessibility

I watched the other lightning talks but then left at 1500 - missing three good talks - to drive home at least partly in daylight.

A great four days - the chance to put some names to faces and to recharge in Debian spaces.

Thanks to all involved and especially ...

Thanks to Cambridge Debian folk for helping arrange evening meals, lifts and so on and especially to those who also happen be ARM employees who were badging us in and out through the four days

Thanks to those who staffed Front Desk on both days and, especially, also to the ARM security guards who let us into site at 0745 on all four days and to Mark who did the weekend shift inside the building for Saturday and Sunday.

Thanks to ARM for  excellent facilities, food, coffee, hosting us and coffee, to Codethink for sponsoring - and a lecture from Sudip and some interesting hardware - and Pexip for Pexip sponsorship (and employee attendance). 

Here's to the next opportunity, whenever that may be.

Back at ARM for MiniDebConf day 2 - Morning sessions 26th November 2023

 Quick recap of slides and safety information for the day from Steve McIntyre

Now into the Release Team questions following a release team overview.

A roomful of people all asking questions which are focused and provoke more questions - how unlike a Debian session :)

May just have talked myself into giving a lightning talk this afternoon :)

Now about to have a talk about from Sudip about OpenQA, kernel testing and automation

Afternoon talks - MiniDebConf ARM Cambridge - Day 1

A great talk on SteamOS progress to effective boot loaders for atomic OS updates.

How to produce something that will allow instant updates and instant fallbacks when updating a whole OS image - lots of explanation - and it's good when three or four people who are directly interested in problems and solutions round, for example, Secure Boot are in the room.

Jessica Clarke on CHERI, Morello and security protections in hardware, software and programming hardware which has verifiable pointers and routines. A couple of flourishes which had the room breaking out in applause.

Roberto Sanchez and Santiago Rincon on suggestions for LTS and ways forward. The presentation very clearly set out what LTS is, is not, and maybe should be.

Last presentation of the day was from Ian Jackson on a potential change to git based working and tagging. 

Then lots of chasing around to get people out of the building. Thanks very much to the Arm personnel, especially the security staff who have been helpful throughout the day with getting us all in and out

Thanks to all involved with Arm, Codethink and Pexip for hosting and sponsorship without which this would not have been possible.

 

Lightning talks - MiniDebConf ARM Cambridge - Day 1

 A quick one slide presentation from Helmut on how to use Debian without sudo - Sudo Apt Purge Sudo

A presentation on upcoming Ph.D research on Digital Obsolescence - from Eda

Antarctic and Arctic research from Carlos Pina i Estany 

* Amazing * what you can get into three well chosen slides.

Ten minutes until the afternoon's talks

Laptop with ARM, mobile phone BoF - MiniDebConf Cambridge day 1

 So following Emanuele's talk on a Lenovo X13s, we're now at the Debian on Mobile BoF (Birds of a feather) discussion session from Arnaud Ferraris

Discussion and questions on how best to support many variants of mobile phones: the short answer seems to be "it's still *hard* - too many devices around to add individual tweaks for every phone and manufacturer.

One thing that may not have been audible in the video soundtrack - lots of laughter in the room prompted as someone's device said, audibly "You are not allowed to do that without unlocking your device"

Upstream and downstream packages for hardware enablement are also hard: basic support is sometimes easy but that might even include non-support for charging, for example.

Much discussion around the numbers of kernels and kernel image proliferation there could be. Debian tends to prefer *one* way of doing things with kernels.

Abstracting hardware is the hardest thing but leads to huge kernels - there's no easy trade-off. Simple/feasible in multiple end user devices/supportable  - pick one ☺

ARM lecture theatre - MiniDebConf Cambridge day 1

And we're here - a couple of lectures in. Welcome from one Steve, deep internals of ARM from another Steve. A room filling with people - and now a lecture I really need to listen to on a machine I'd like to own.

 As ever, the hallway track is interesting - and you find people who know you from IRC or mailing lists. 

Four screens and a lecture theatre layout. Here we go.

Video team doing a great job, as ever - and our brand new talkmeister is doing a sterling job. 

Mini-DebCamp ARM Cambridge day 2

 Another really good day at ARM. Still lots of coffee and good food - supplemented by a cooked breakfast if you were early enough :)

Lots of small groups of people working earnestly in the main lecture theatre and a couple of meeting rooms and the soft seating area: various folk arriving  ready for tomorrow. Video team setting up in the afternoon and running up servers and cabling - all ready for a full schedule tomorrow and Sunday.

Many thanks to our sponsors - and especially the helpful staff at ARM who were helping us in and out, sorting out meeting rooms and generally coping with a Debian invasion. More people tomorrow for the weekend.

20231123 - UEFI install on a Raspberry Pi 4 - step by step instructions to a modified d-i

Motivation

 Andy (RattusRattus) and I have been formalising instructions for using Pete Batard's version of Tianocore (and therefore UEFI booting) for the Raspberry Pi 4 together with a Debian arm64 netinst to make a modified Debian installer on a USB stick which "just works" for a Raspberry Pi 4.

Thanks also to Steve McIntyre for initial notes that got this working for us and also to Emmanuele Rocca for putting up some useful instructions for copying.

Recipe

Plug in a USB stick - use dmesg or your favourite method to see how it is identified.

Make a couple of mount points under /mnt - /mnt/data and /mnt/cdrom

1. Grab a USB stick, Partition using MBR. Make a single VFAT
   partition, type 0xEF (i.e. EFI System Partition)

For a USB stick (identified as sdX) below:

$ sudo parted --script /dev/sdX mklabel msdos 

$ sudo parted --script /dev/sdX mkpart primary fat32 0% 100% 

$ sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdX1 $ sudo mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/data/

Download an arm64 netinst.iso

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/arm64/iso-cd/debian-12.2.0-arm64-netinst.iso

2. Copy the complete contents of partition *1* from a Debian arm64
   installer image into the filesystem (partition 1 is the installer
   stuff itself) on the USB stick, in /

$ sudo kpartx -v -a debian-12.2.0-arm64-netinst.iso 

# Mount the first partition on the ISO and copy its contents to the stick 

$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 /mnt/cdrom/ 

$ sudo rsync -av /mnt/cdrom/ /mnt/data/ 

$ sudo umount /mnt/cdrom

3. Copy the complete contents of partition *2* from that Debian arm64
  installer image into that filesystem (partition 2 is the ESP) on
   the USB stick, in /

# Same story with the second partition on the ISO

$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p2 /mnt/cdrom/

$ sudo rsync -av /mnt/cdrom/ /mnt/data/ $ sudo umount /mnt/cdrom

$ sudo kpartx -d debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso $ sudo umount /mnt/data

4. Grab the rpi edk2 build from https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases
   (I used 1.35) and extract it. I copied the files there into *2*
   places for now on the USB stick:

   /      (so the Pi will boot using it)
   /rpi4  (so we can find the files again later)

5. Add the preseed.cfg file (attached) into *both* of the two initrd
   files on the USB stick

   - /install.a64/initrd.gz and
   - /install.a64/gtk/initrd.gz

   cpio is an awful tool to use :-(. In each case:

$ cp /path/to/initrd.gz .
$ gunzip initrd.gz
$ echo preseed.cfg | cpio -H newc -o -A -F initrd 

$ gzip -9v initrd

$ cp initrd.gz /path/to/initrd.gz

If you look at the preseed file, it will do a few things:

   - Use an early_command to unmount /media (to work around Debian bug
     #1051964)

   - Register a late_command call for /cdrom/finish-rpi (the next
     file - see below) to run at the end of the installation.

   - Force grub installation also to the EFI removable media path,
     needed as the rpi doesn't store EFI boot variables.

   - Stop the installer asking for firmware from removable media (as
     the rpi4 will ask for broadcom bluetooth fw that we can't
     ship. Can be ignored safely.)

6. Copy the finish-rpi script (attached) into / on the USB stick. It
   will be run at the end of the installation, triggered via the
   preseed. It does a couple of things:

   - Copy the edk2 firmware files into the ESP on the system that's
     just been installer

   - Remove shim-signed from the installed systems, as there's a bug
     that causes it to fail on rpi4. I need to dig into this to see
     what the issue is.

That's it! Run the installer as normal, all should Just Work (TM).

BlueTooth didn't quite work : raspberrypi-firmware didn't install until adding a symlink for boot/efi to /boot/firmware

20231127 - This may not be necessary because raspberrypi-firmware path has been fixed

Preseed.cfg

# The preseed file itself causes a problem - the installer medium is
# left mounted on /medis so things break in cdrom-detect. Let's see if
# we can fix that!
d-i preseed/early_command string umount /media || true

# Run our command to do rpi setup before reboot
d-i preseed/late_command string /cdrom/finish-rpi

# Force grub installation to the RM path
grub-efi-arm64  grub2/force_efi_extra_removable boolean true

# Don't prompt for missing firmware from removable media,
# e.g. broadcom bluetooth on the rpi.
d-i hw-detect/load_firmware boolean false

Finish.rpi

 !/bin/sh

set -x

grep -q -a RPI4 /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/CSRT
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
    echo "Not running on a Pi 4, exit!"
    exit 0
fi

# Copy the rpi4 firmware binaries onto the installed system.
# Assumes the installer media is mounted on /cdrom.
cp -vr /cdrom/rpi4/. /target/boot/efi/.

# shim-signed doesn't seem happy on rpi4, so remove it
mount --bind /sys /target/sys
mount --bind /proc /target/proc
mount --bind /dev /target/dev

in-target apt-get remove --purge --autoremove -y shim-signed

Arm Cambridge - mini-Debcamp 23 November 2023

 At Arm for two days before the mini-Debconf this weekend.

First time at Arm for a few years: huge new buildings, shiny lecture theatre.

Arm have made us very welcome. A superb buffet lunch and unlimited coffee plus soft drinks - I think they know what Debian folk are like.
Not enough power blocks laid out at the beginning - only one per table - but we soon fixed that 😀

The room is full of Debian folk: some I know, some new faces. Reminiscing about meeting some of them from 25 years ago - and the chance to thank people for help over a long time.

Andy (RattusRattus) and I have been working out the bugs on an install script using UEFI for a Raspberry Pi 4. More on that in the next post, maybe.

As ever, it's the sort of place where "I can't get into the wiki" is sorted by walking three metres across the room or where an "I can't find where to get X for Raspberry Pi" can be solved by asking the person who builds Raspbian. "Did you try and sign up to the Debian wiki last week - you didn't follow the instructions to mail wiki@ - I _know_ you didn't because I didn't see the mail ... "

My kind of place and my kind of people, as ever.

Thanks again to Arm who are one of our primary sponsors for this mini-Debconf.