Dear Maintainer,

On an Apple Mac mini M2 running Debian 13 (Trixie), the integrated ASMedia USB-A controller fails to initialize because its required firmware is unavailable during early boot.

The original kernel messages were:

    xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: firmware: failed to load asmedia/asm2214a-apple.bin (-2)
    xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: Could not load firmware asmedia/asm2214a-apple.bin: -2
    xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: probe with driver xhci_hcd failed with error -2

As a result, devices connected directly to the USB-A ports do not work.

Investigation:

The required firmware is present in the Asahi vendor firmware archive, firmware.cpio, on the EFI system partition.

The installed init-top/asahi script declares PREREQ="udev" and extracts the firmware after udev initialization.

The init-bottom/asahi script copies the extracted firmware into /lib/firmware/vendor/ on the root filesystem.

However, the ASMedia driver requests asmedia/asm2214a-apple.bin during early initialization.

Tested workaround:

    sudo install -D -m 0644 /lib/firmware/vendor/asmedia/asm2214a-apple.bin /lib/firmware/asmedia/asm2214a-apple.bin
    sudo update-initramfs -u -k "$(uname -r)"

After rebuilding the initramfs and rebooting, the ASMedia controller initializes successfully. USB-A keyboard and mouse devices work automatically without manually reprobeing the PCI device.

This was verified with Linux kernel 6.17.9+deb13.2-asahi.

I also inspected asahi-scripts 20250713-3~bpo13+1 from trixie-backports. Its init-top/asahi script now declares PREREQ="" instead of PREREQ="udev", but its initramfs hook still does not explicitly include the ASMedia firmware at the driver's expected path. I have not tested whether that newer version resolves the issue.

Please investigate ensuring that the required ASMedia firmware is available at the expected path early enough during initramfs initialization.

Thank you for maintaining Debian support for Apple Silicon hardware.

Best regards,
Jeroen Diederen