Debian Installer Bullseye RC 3 release

August 2nd, 2021

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the third release candidate of the installer for Debian 11 Bullseye.

Let's start with some news regarding firmware support (#989863):

We don't want to leave users in the dark if the installed system doesn't boot correctly (e.g. black screen, garbled display). We mentioned that possibility in the installation guide, and listed a few workarounds that might help log in anyway.
We also documented an isenkram-based procedure which lets users detect and fix missing firmware on their systems, in an automated fashion. Of course, one has to weigh the pros and cons of using that tool since it's very likely that it will need to install non-free packages.

In addition to those documentation efforts, the non-free installer images that include firmware packages have been improved so that they can anticipate the need for firmware in the installed system (e.g. firmware for AMD or Nvidia graphics cards, or newer generations of Intel audio hardware).

Improvements in this release

cdrom-detect:
- Tell hw-detect not to warn and prompt about missing firmware: finding and mounting the ISO image happens so early that nothing could be done about missing firmware at this stage anyway (#991587).
hw-detect:
- Add support for installing additional firmware packages if items in the udev database match some modalias-based patterns, based on DEP-11 metadata (#989863).
- Make sure to reload the appropriate kernel module after having injected some firmware: there might be some discrepancy as can be seen with rtw_8821ce vs. rtw88_8821ce (#973733).
- Improve firmware-related logging by removing obsolete code, removing duplicates, adjusting format strings.
- Add support for ignoring some particular firmware files that might be neither actually required, nor packaged; start with iwl-debug-yoyo.bin, requested by iwlwifi (#969264, #966218).
- Make it possible for callers to disable warning and prompting about missing firmware.
debian-cd:
- Add brltty and espeakup to all images from netinst up (#678065).
- Generate firmware metadata from AppStream/DEP-11 metadata, and use it when building a media tree (#989863).
debian-installer:
- Bump Linux kernel ABI to 5.10.0-8.
pcmciautils:
- Update /etc/pcmciautils/ dir to /etc/pcmcia/ in udeb (#980271).
udpkg:
- Add locking for the status file, avoiding failures on the first installation step when multiple consoles are involved (#987368).

Hardware support changes

linux:
- arm64: Add pwm-rockchip to fb-modules udeb.
- arm64: Add fusb302, tcpm and typec to usb-modules udeb.
- armhf: Fix network detection on various i.MX6 boards (#982270).
- armhf: Add mdio-aspeed to nic-modules (#991262).
- s390x: Fix console name to match device (#961056).

Localization status

78 languages are supported in this release.
Full translation for 36 of them.

Known issues in this release

See the errata for details and a full list of known issues.

Feedback for this release

We need your help to find bugs and further improve the installer, so please try it. Installer CDs, other media and everything else you will need are available at our web site.

Thanks

The Debian Installer team thanks everybody who has contributed to this release.