Package: linux-image-6.7.12-arm64 Version: 6.7.12-1 Severity: important Tags: newcomer
Dear Maintainer, I have a Bananapi BPI-R3 board which uses the Mediatek MT7986 ARM64 SoC for its CPU. This is a router focussed board and currently has good support in the OpenWRT distribution and in the upstream Linux for a few years. The device tree for this board is https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/arm64/boot/dts/mediatek/mt7986a-bananapi- bpi-r3.dts (as well as some .dtso files to enable specific flash chip options). I have managed to get a custom U-boot build running that supports UEFI. So I started testing the Ubuntu and Debian installers on a USB stick. With Ubuntu 22.04 (HWE kernel) and 24.04 the USB stick boots up into the installer fine, however the Ethernet drivers are missing. For Debian I tried the Debian stable 12.5.0 DVD ISO and the latest Debian testing DVD ISO. Both boot into the GRUB menu fine, but after editing the GRUB command line to remove the "quiet" kernel option, the Kernel fails to boot and is left with no output except for the U-boot UEFI messages: EFI stub: Booting Linux Kernel... EFI stub: EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL unavailable EFI stub: Loaded initrd from LINUX_EFI_INITRD_MEDIA_GUID device path EFI stub: Using DTB from configuration table EFI stub: Exiting boot services... There is a similar bug report #1052676 which was about supporting some MT8xxx based Chromebooks. So I had a look at the kernel modules included in the current testing kernel: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/arm64/linux-image-6.7.12-arm64/filelist I can see the various MT8xxx module files, but no files for the MT7986. I believe based on my Ubuntu results that if all the modules required are built, then Debian testing will be able to boot on this board. There is a relevant discussion in https://salsa.debian.org/kernel- team/linux/-/merge_requests/906#note_483427 which was the code change that added the MT8xxx support about the various MT6xxx and MT7xxx modules being disabled. This is a shame as it seems that without explicitly disabling them then this code change would have added the modules I need. I am happy to do any testing required to get this board supported. I think it would also be useful to enable support for the MT7988 SoC and Bananapi have a new board, the BPI-R4 with this chip. I have not yet purchased this board, but I can do for testing with that SoC as well. On the U-boot side, there is another related bug report #1037281. Once I can get the kernel booting, I am happy to help with U-boot as well, based on my findings so far. -- System Information: Debian Release: bullseye/sid APT prefers focal-updates APT policy: (500, 'focal-updates'), (500, 'focal-security'), (500, 'focal'), (100, 'focal-backports') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 5.15.0-107-generic (SMP w/8 CPU cores) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_LIVEPATCH Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_AU:en (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled
