Re: Xen bootup: issue with Raspberry Pi 5?

[Paul Leiber <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Am 15.07.2025 um 02:48 schrieb Elliott Mitchell:
> On Tue, Jul 01, 2025 at 10:01:13PM +0200, Paul Leiber wrote:
> > Unfortunately, I don't have a direct answer to the question (as is so often
> > the case, due to my limited knowledge and experience). However, I am
> > successfully running Xen on a RPi 4 (mostly, except for some VLAN related
> > networking issues).
> >
> > I used instructions in [1] to install vanilla Debian on the RPi, including
> > UEFI boot and grub. I then compiled Xen with expert options and ACPI
> > enabled.
> >
> > I don't know if there are better solutions. For example, I suffer from the
> > fact that I2C doesn't work when using UEFI boot on a RPi. Nowadays, Debian
> > provides their own vanilla Debian images for RPi and with working I2C, but
> > these images are using a different boot method that I didn't know how to use
> > with Xen.  So far, the procedure described above seems to be the easiest
> > solution for me.
> So far I've been doing similar.  Problem is EFI framebuffer support
> doesn't work under Xen.  I had been pushing for Xen to support ACPI as
> this is far simpler than other approaches, but so far everyone likes
> device-trees due to being simple to develop for.  Yet they are then
> absolute nightmares unless you leave everything unchanged, rather
> crucially this means no security updates...
>
> There seemed to be a desire to move to U-Boot => UEFI => GRUB for booting
> (similar to SuSE, others), but currently the Debian images do not support
> this.  I was under the impression the Debian Raspberry PI images were
> volunteer work not officially part of Debian.
The images are created by a Debian developer and are hosted on Debian 
webspace. [1] But as the developer states, they are not put to the same 
scrutiny as the Debian installation images.
[1] https://raspi.debian.net/what-is-image/

Paul