Hello planet !

Introducing myself

My name is Romain, I have been nominated to the status of  Debian Maintainer recently. I am part of the debian-kernel team (still a padawan) since few months, and, as a DM, I will co-maintain the package raspi3-firmware with Gunnar Wolf.

Current contributions

As a kernel and linux en enginner, I focus on embedded stuffs and kernel development. This is a summary of what I have done in the previous months.

Kernel team

As a contributor, I work a various things, I try to work where help is the more needed. I have wrote a python script for generating debian changelog in firmware-nonfree, I have bumped the package for new releases. I bump the linux kernel for new upstream releases, I help to close and resolve bugs, I backport new features when it makes sense for doing so, enable new hardware and recently I have added  new flavour for the RPI 1 and RPI Zero in armel ! (spoil)

Raspi3-firmware

I have recently added a new mode in the configuration file of the package that let you device what you would like to boot from the firmware. You can either boot a linux kernel directly, passing the adress of the initramfs to use, a baremetal application, or a second level bootloader like u-boot or barebox (personnally I prefer u-boot). From u-boot then, you can use extlinux and get a nice generated menu by uboot menu. I have also added the support for using the devicetree-blob of the RPI 1 and the RPI Zero W when the firmware boots the kernel directly. I am also participating for reducing lintian warnings, new upstream release and improvements in general.

U-Boot

I have recently sent a MR for enabling support for the RPI Zero W in uboot for armel and it was accepted (thanks to Vagrant). As I use U-Boot everyday on my boards, I will probably send others MR ;)

Raspberry Pi Zero

As written described above, I have added a flavour for enabling support for the RPI1 and RPI Zero in armel for Linux 4.19.x. Like the Raspberry PI 3, there are no official images for this, but you can use debos or vmdb2 for building a buster image for your PI Zero. I have personally tried it, at home. I was able to run an LXDE session, with llvmpipe (I am still investigating if vc4 in gallium works for this SoC or not, while it's working perfectly fine for the PI3, it fallback to llvmpipe on the PI Zero).

Raspberry Pi 3

As posted on planet recently by Gunnar, you can find an unofficial image for the PI 3 if you want to try it. On buster you will be able to run a kernel 4.19.x LTS with an excellent DRM/KMS support and Gallium support in mesa. I was able to run a LXDE session with VC4 gallium here !

Future work

I will try my best to get an excellent support for all Raspberry PI in Debian (with unofficial images at the beginning). Including kernel support, kernel bugs fixes or improvements, debos and/or vmdb2 recipes for generating buster images easily, and even graphical stack hacks :) . I will continue my work in the kernel-team, because there are a tons of things to do, and of courses as co-maintainer, maintain raspi3-firmware (that will be probably renamed to something more generic, *spoil*).