I’ve been thinking for a while that I’d like to get Debian Bookworm on my DevTerm. Now that the latest Raspberry Pi OS version is out and it’s based on Debian Bookworm, I’m looking forward to a Bookworm-based image! I think I’ll try following the instructions to build my own image as well.
Update: so far I haven’t really gotten it working! I can boot Raspberry OS lite with Clockwork’s build of the 5.15 kernel, but as soon as I install a graphical environment, it fails to boot, presumably because of kernel modules with the wrong version I actually have no idea why.
I also tried to patch and build my own 6.1 kernel based on the Raspberry Pi kernel at github.com/raspberrypi/linux. While I was able to manually apply the DevTerm patches and get it to build, I haven’t gotten my kernel to boot yet.
Update (2023-11-10): I actually have been having success running the stock RP OS Bookworm lite image with the DevTerm’s kernel and device trees. I just need to be careful to not allow kernel upgrades that will mess up my boot partition. I also tried:
- Moving the DevTerm kernel from kernel8.img to kernel-devterm-5.10.img, and modifying config.txt to point to that kernel image. That way, I can let Debian update its kernel without causing trouble. I haven’t gotten this to work, however. I can’t boot past the bootloader when I do this.
- My custom-patched 6.1 kernel. Still won’t boot though.
To debug both of these problems, I have an I/O board coming in the mail that I will use to flash the bootloader firmware and enable UART logging in the bootloader. enable_uart=true in config.txt works great for getting kernel logs over UART, but I need the bootloader logs as well since my kernel isn’t even booting yet.
Update (2023-11-17): After enabling UART logs, I was able to see that my patched 6.1 kernel does boot, it just doesn’t have working drivers for the screen or keyboard.