Debian is a commonly used distribution on embedded devices, however more often than not single-board computers available on the market just run some sort of Debian derivative that is provisioned as a binary image to be flashed to an SD card where the device will boot from. At the same time linux distributions for industrial embedded computer are often based on Yocto/OpenEmbedded or buildroot.

This talks will explore what is required to install and run a non modified Debian in an industrial arm/arm64 embedded device running the U-Boot bootloader.

We will investigate the various option to install Debian, either running debian-installer (from network or from an external storage media) or using debootstrap, we will look into how the bootloader is loading the OS (kernel, initrd and devicetree), looking at U-Boot distroboot/Standard Boot and UEFI and after that we will have a look at the required support from the Linux kernel.

During the talk we will also describe the steps needed to contribute support for a specific board to Debian.