On Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:17:05 -0400 Aaron Rainbolt <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:32:04 -0400 > Aaron Rainbolt <[email protected]> wrote: ... snip ... > I'm not sure if this is particularly safe, since it depends on the > Raspberry Pi firmware only checking the second (or perhaps first two) > partitions for GPT protective MBR partitions, and depends on the Linux > kernel continuing to recognize a disk as GPT-formatted even if only a > small part of it is covered by a protective partition. This might also > not work on newer (or older) Raspberry Pi versions. But, with Debian > Trixie, on a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8 GB RAM, this works. The > alternative would be to switch to an MBR-only partition table, which > is what grml-debootstrap currently does. This is probably safer in > the long run, but maybe there are reasons to avoid this. > > -- > Aaron Small update, it looks like this is a case of the raspi-firmware package in Trixie being too old. Raspberry Pi OS is able to boot (well, load the kernel and initramfs anyway, I didn't get bootup to work all the way, but not because I couldn't, just because I didn't) with a hybrid MBR configuration similar to what the Trixie cloud image is using. Furthermore, the hybrid MBR layout also works on a Trixie cloud image if I copy over the start*.elf and fixup*.dat files from a Raspberry Pi OS firmware partition to the Trixie cloud image firmware partition. I'll be filing a bug report in Debian for this in the near future. -- Aaron
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