Debian Stretch ARM64 for Raspberry Pi 3

[code_exec]

I am happy to announce that I have managed to get Debian Stretch ARM64 running on the Raspberry Pi 3 with a custom kernel. It required me to recompile the Raspbian kernel with ARM64 support and install the kernel modules, as well as install a few other packages.

I managed to get Debian Stretch running with the XFCE desktop running Chromium and LibreOffice at acceptable speed.



Pi's built-in WiFi currently not working, but Ethernet works fine. I've released a pre-release image you can find at https://github.com/CodeExecution/Debian64Pi under the releases section. This image is in testing stage and you may encounter some issues.

For those who want to build the image themselves, instructions are found at https://github.com/CodeExecution/Debian ... uctions.md

The image is a minimal installation and does not include a desktop environment, but one can be installed by following the instructions on the GitHub page. Once Debian Stretch for Pi 3 becomes stable, I will release versions that have desktop environments pre-installed (such as Debian XFCE and Debian MATE).

[code_exec]

Debian Stretch using the MATE desktop. I'll be uploading an image to my GitHub repository which already has the MATE desktop preinstalled soon.

[code_exec]

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[jdonald]

This is great. It provides a familiar environment where users can quickly test the latest Chromium, Firefox, modern databases and other software that is now unsupported on armhf.

In my opinion the number one feature missing here is a working Mesa VC4 driver. When Bamarni pi64 was released it initially didn't have accelerated graphics, but the bar is higher now with Gentoo64, Crazyhead's Raspbian64, and supposedly Fedora aarch64.

Newer versions of Chromium are needed for decent WebGL functionality, but that's no good without a driver.

[code_exec]

This is great. It provides a familiar environment where users can quickly test the latest Chromium, Firefox, modern databases and other software that is now unsupported on armhf.

In my opinion the number one feature missing here is a working Mesa VC4 driver. When Bamarni pi64 was released it initially didn't have accelerated graphics, but the bar is higher now with Gentoo64, Crazyhead's Raspbian64, and supposedly Fedora aarch64.

Newer versions of Chromium are needed for decent WebGL functionality, but that's no good without a driver.

People have tried enabling OpenGL through config.txt on my Debian images, but nothing happened. I believe this is because the OpenGL overlay is 32-bit, whereas the Debian system is 64-bit.

EDIT: This seems to be correct. The Pi 3's SoC is 64-bit, but the VideoCore IV GPU is still 32-bit. But considering distros like Fedora and Gentoo offer VC4 acceleration, I'm wondering how to get it in my Debian and Ubuntu images.

EDIT 2: What I said in Edit 1 turned out to be false. Read the reply below.

[code_exec]

Seems like what I said was false. The kernel I used in my Debian images (4.18 or 4.19, I can't remember) seems to be at fault for the overlay not working. I tried building a test Debian XFCE ARM64 image for the Pi 3 that used kernel 4.14.95 and then enabling OpenGL in config.txt and the Pi booted using the OpenGL driver.

LightDM failed and constantly flashed.
SLIM worked perfectly.
GDM3 showed a blank screen with a frozen cursor.