Re: Xen bootup: issue with Raspberry Pi 5?

[Elliott Mitchell <ehem+xen@xxxxxxx>]

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.


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