Adding Raspberry Pi CM3 support to Debian Buster

As a member of the Debian community in general, and as the Release Manager for the Debian Installer in particular, my work is usually about making sure the testing distribution (which prefigures what the next Debian stable release will be) gets appropriate care and is in a sufficiently good shape to get released around the planned date.

But the publication of a new Debian stable release doesn’t mean the work is over and that it’s left on its own! We have the usual support from the Debian Security team, and updates can also flow through stable-proposed-updates, which is under the supervision of the Debian Stable Release Managers. Those updates are released in a specific suite, and users can opt in, joining the fun and testing those updated packages. When it’s time for a “point release”, most if not all packages from the Security archive are merged into stable, along with those available from stable-proposed-updates. This happened a week ago with the publication of both Debian 10.1 (first point release for buster) and Debian 9.11 (eleventh point release for stretch).

If you’d like to know more about the machinery behind such updates, you can read the Adding Raspberry Pi CM3 support to Debian Buster article on DEBAMAX’s blog. This article explains how updates to a Debian stable release don’t necessarily mean bug fixes, and how features can sometimes be added (e.g. hardware support).

Happy reading!