Fedora 34 with EFI boot on Raspberry Pi 4
At last night's Raspberry Pi meetup, Chris Tyler demonstrated Fedora 34 (aarch64) on Raspberry Pi 4. It's supposed to be a fully supported distribution, although the documentation hasn't quite caught up. It looked pretty neat, and I might be tempted to try it. I've been a Debian user this entire century so far, though, so there might be some friction. Audio over HDMI isn't supported yet, which will mean some hardware juggling for me. The EFI boot hasn't made it to other distros on Raspberry Pi yet, so the installation has to be from a raw image or Fedora's arm-image-installer tool. Fedora Workstation is here: https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/ and you'll be wanting the aarch64 raw image. cheers, Stewart
On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 6:34 AM Stewart Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
At last night's Raspberry Pi meetup, Chris Tyler demonstrated Fedora 34 (aarch64) on Raspberry Pi 4. It's supposed to be a fully supported distribution, although the documentation hasn't quite caught up.
It looked pretty neat, and I might be tempted to try it. I've been a Debian user this entire century so far, though, so there might be some friction. Audio over HDMI isn't supported yet, which will mean some hardware juggling for me.
The EFI boot hasn't made it to other distros on Raspberry Pi yet, so the installation has to be from a raw image or Fedora's arm-image-installer tool.
Fedora Workstation is here: https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/ and you'll be wanting the aarch64 raw image.
Useful information - - - but - - - - it was Fedora that I moved FROM and it was DEBIAN that I moved TO some 15 or so years ago. That the documentation is late or poor or hasn't caught up - - - - its that 'the new normal'? (Has been for as long as I've been using Linux.) I'll wait for a while - - - things will shake out further. Bleeding edge stuff has really lost its appeal. This is good news though. (Wonder how the hdmi code that would be used on that Pi is going to work - - - - I'm having issues with HDMI and nouveau - - - - anyone 'know'?) Regards
On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 07:34:14AM -0400, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:
At last night's Raspberry Pi meetup, Chris Tyler demonstrated Fedora 34 (aarch64) on Raspberry Pi 4. It's supposed to be a fully supported distribution, although the documentation hasn't quite caught up.
It looked pretty neat, and I might be tempted to try it. I've been a Debian user this entire century so far, though, so there might be some friction. Audio over HDMI isn't supported yet, which will mean some hardware juggling for me.
The EFI boot hasn't made it to other distros on Raspberry Pi yet, so the installation has to be from a raw image or Fedora's arm-image-installer tool.
Ah. I hadn't paid much attention for a while now to the booting details for Pi's. I had missed that we were moving on from Das U-boot and device trees. I understand these things only dimly but having slogged through tedious configure/restart/re-configure/restart cycles in the LILO days, and the explosion of complexity in grub and (U)EFI later, I have a visceral appreciation for their importance. The riotous complexity at such low levels across boards that are all ostensibly "ARM" has been discouraging, to be honest. I despaired of it ever, ah, firming up in a way that rewarded the hard work of people trying to make free software work on them in the same way as had been the case for x86 BIOSen back in the day. Looking to find out what has been happening, when, and how far along things are, I found this: https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/18/raspberry-pi-4-uefiacpi-firmware-aim... Fun thing, for some values of "fun": Case-sensitivity matters particularly here since "PI" in TianoCore contexts refers to "Platform Initialization" https://www.tianocore.org/ rather than the shortest name for these wee ARM boards, for which "rpi" seems to be the thing https://rpi4-uefi.dev/about/ Thanks to Chris and to Stewart for bringing it up and for bringing it to the list. Even now, this seems server-oriented so I don't know if we might see some relief for eg mobile devices. The port of Linux to the M1 Macs has given me a ray of hope but I remember how Apple has held doors open before only later to bar them. -- Joe
On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 10:33 AM D. Joe via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I had missed that we were moving on from Das U-boot and device trees.
The server/enterprise communities are quite fond of EFI/UEFI. The embedded community will be staying with u-boot (and friends) for the foreseeable future. Regardless of boot method, the Linux kernel community will be using device tree.
On Fri, 10 Sep 2021 07:34:14 -0400 Stewart Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
At last night's Raspberry Pi meetup, Chris Tyler demonstrated Fedora 34 (aarch64) on Raspberry Pi 4. It's supposed to be a fully supported distribution, although the documentation hasn't quite caught up.
Stewart, Let the distribution wars begin! I am running Fedora 33 on all my machines at the moment, having gone through Slackware, and various Red Hat distributions. I have been testing and documenting the installation of distributions, and I agree that Ubuntu is the easiest. Fedora is my comfort spot. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca jhowardgibson@gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
On 2021-09-10 10:39 a.m., Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
Let the distribution wars begin!
Let's not. Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?
From my user point of view, it makes almost no difference what Linux I'm running on. It might as well be a Linux called Mac OS X if it gets the job done: it feels the same to me.
What I like: * reliability * easy upgrading * lots of software that's fairly recent that's also easy to install * security I don't have to think about. What I don't like: * tedious gatekeeping over what to include over licences resulting in unmaintained, ancient packages in the distro * unnecessary questions during package upgrades. No, I don't know what /etc/frammitz.conf does, and I'm unlikely to care when it changes * unreliable, untested technology like Wayland that breaks user stuff that I need. I'd give a distro a pass if they provide all the sharing stuff I rely on under X under Wayland and make it work identically. In other words, I don't want to care about what technology it's using. * having more than one package management system (snapd, I'm looking at you) * KDE cheers, Stewart
participants (6)
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D. Joe -
Howard Gibson -
o1bigtenor -
Stewart C. Russell -
Stewart Russell
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Trevor Woerner