Setup RaspiOS Bullseye on Raspberry Pi 5

Raspberry Pi 5 officially supports only Debian Bookworm. This could be problem sometimes.

In this procedure we update the firmware and graphic driver but still keep Debian Bullseye.

By the way you need to edit rootfs (ext4) before initial setup, hence a Linux machine is required.

1. download files

   • https://codeload.github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/zip/refs/heads/stable
   • https://downloads.raspberrypi.com/raspios_oldstable_arm64/images/raspios_oldstable_arm64-2024-10-28/2024-10-22-raspios-bullseye-arm64.img.xz

2. flash raspios to sdcard

   • xz -cd < 2024-10-22-raspios-bullseye-arm64.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sd...

3. copy new firmware and configure xorg

   • now unpack firmware-stable.zip

   • eject and reinsert SD, now you see bootfs and rootfs

     • copy firmware-stable/boot to bootfs but keep cmdline.txt and config.txt
     • copy firmware-stable/modules to rootfs usr/lib/modules (need sudo)

   • setup etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-vc4.conf

     • reference: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2159161#p2159161

   Section "OutputClass"
     Identifier "vc4"
     MatchDriver "vc4"
     Driver "modesetting"
     Option "PrimaryGPU" "true"
   EndSection
   

4. Boot raspi 5 and complete initial setup, then enable SSH (raspi-config)

   • Now you see weird screen like window menu bar is missing, but you should be able to barely work on terminal.

5. Install mesa 24

   • In this state, V3D 7.1 graphic driver is missing, so mesa 24 has to be installed.
   • I have built mesa 24 and uploaded to https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/5tacw9prkow5qv6wzeep6/AABJ1rd0BvaoDdJiiK8BFpg?rlkey=h19lu9zz1z7zh5m2yymn48qdr&st=f405hnbe&dl=0
     • After copying the files to raspi, just run apt install ./*.deb
     • If you don't like prebuilt binary, you can still build https://github.com/cielavenir/dockerfiles/blob/master/mesa_bullseye_arm64.sh

6. Setup GL driver config (raspi-config)

   • advanced -> GL driver -> GL driver
   • advanced -> Glamor -> enable

7. Reboot

   • Now window menu bar is back and glxinfo -B says OpenGL vendor string: Broadcom