Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 3 Switches To Linux 5.9, Larger /boot

While the Debian 11 "Bullseye" freezes don't get started until January, the Debian Installer for Bullseye has been in alpha for just over a year. Today marks the third alpha release of the Debian Installer for Bullseye.

Notable with this alpha update is switching over to the Linux 5.9.0-4 kernel. Linux 5.9 is currently the latest stable kernel series. We'll see if Linux 5.10 ends up making it into Debian 11 "Bullseye" especially as this will be a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel release maintained for a period of at least five years, so presumably they will try to align on this kernel version for Bullseye.

Another notable difference with this Debian Installer update is partman-auto for the automatic partitioning increasing the size of /boot. When needing to make a separate /boot partition such as for full-disk encryption use-cases, the size will now be 512~768M rather than 128~256M as is the current default. This increase is being made since the current default has long been considered "too small" in that often times three kernel images can't even fit in /boot any longer without being filled up.

This installer update also has hardware detection and driver improvements with brltty, new languages of Kabyle and Occitan, adding ntfs-3g-udeb on ARM64, and a variety of fixes. Some of the hardware support changes with Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 3 include enabling the graphical installer on ARM64, dropping Xfce single CD images, dropping DVD ISO images 2 and 3 for AMD64/i386, enabling the GTK Debian installer build for ARM64, and support for a lot of new ARM hardware support.

New hardware support includes the Pinebook Pro, OLPC XO-1.75, NanoPi NEO Air, Firefly RK3399, RockPRO64 RK3399 / ROCK64 RK3328, and more.

The full list of changes can be found via the debian-devel-announce.