[Pkg-raspi-maintainers] Bug#1115738: raspi-firmware: PoE HAT's fan not working due to outdated overlays

[Fernando Fernández]

Package: raspi-firmware
Version: 1.20240424+ds-6
Severity: important
Tags: newcomer
X-Debbugs-Cc: ferferga at hotmail.com

Dear Maintainer,

I'm an user of the official's Raspberry Pi PoE Hat (the first one, not the PoE+)
With the current overlays distributed with this package, the fan doesn't work
(which in my case it's critical, since it being in a case means it overheats and crash
the whole system, but I'm aware not all users have a PoE Hat and/or case, so I don't
see it fitting the critical severity). However, as soon as I replace the files
from this package with the files from the official Raspberry OS distribution,
the fan works perfectly.

Every time a new kernel update is released, or initramfs is regenerated
with the 'update-initramfs' command, the files of /boot/firmware
are replaced with the version from /usr/lib/raspi-firmware, so I need to do this
every time this happens:

1. Download the official Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) Lite image.
2. Access the FAT32 boot partition from the image and xtract all the files
except cmdline.txt, config.txt, kernel8.img and kernel_2712.img
3. Back to my Raspberry Pi, delete everything from /boot/firmware except
cmdline.txt, config.txt, initrd.img* and vmlinuz-* (those are the only things that you must keep in that folder)
4. Copy the files you obtained in step no. 2 to /boot/firmware

Once this is done, the fan keeps spinning at the next boot after a kernel or initramfs update.

I don't know the reasoning behind it but, for some reason, only a minor set of overlays
seem to be included in this package and not all of them. It
would be awesome if all of them could be included, which would make the
transition from Raspberry Pi OS user's to a real fully fledged Debian system much easier
(it took me a month to discover the workaround I listed before) +
avoid these kind of "obscure" issues that might not be relevant to you due to not having
way of reproducing this (in this case, I guess you don't own a PoE Hat and was completely unaware of this).

Hopefully this can be fixed before the next Debian major release because it's a real pain to remember
doing in every update and it's something that made me unable to access my Pi a few times I ran
apt upgrade on a rush days eariler and then completely forgot about it. I've been procrastinating opening this issue
for quite some time due to being really busy this past year and last May was almost going to open it,
but trixie was around the corner, which made me think that it might be already solved since all the overlays
from this package were going to be updated anyway, but I was wrong ^^'.

Hopeful that this information can help you get this sorted better, but in any case, don't hesitate to contact me
(it's my first time using Debian's bug tracker, so it might take a while for me to get used to it).

Thank you very much in advance,
Fernando

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 13.1
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: arm64 (aarch64)

Kernel: Linux 6.12.43+deb13-arm64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=es_ES.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=es_ES.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to es_ES.UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages raspi-firmware depends on:
ii  dosfstools  4.2-1.2
ii  dpkg        1.22.21

raspi-firmware recommends no packages.

Versions of packages raspi-firmware suggests:
pn  bluez-firmware         <none>
pn  firmware-brcm80211     <none>
pn  firmware-misc-nonfree  <none>

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/default/raspi-firmware changed:
CMA=0
ROOTPART="PARTUUID=77bc596e-02"


-- no debconf information