SUSE Working On Upstream Linux Kernel Support For Booting The Raspberry Pi 5

While the Raspberry Pi 5 debuted last September already, sadly the mainline Linux kernel still lacks support for booting this popular single board computer... The support on Raspberry Pi OS and other downstream distributions/kernels is good, but the mainline kernel support for the Raspberry Pi SBCs remains a sore spot for this popular ARM single board computer. SUSE engineers have been working on implementing minimal boot support for the Raspberry Pi 5 that will hopefully make it to the mainline kernel.

Building off a prior set of patches posted last month for the BCM2712 SD card controller, SUSE's Andrea della Porta sent out a set of four patches on Friday to provide minimal boot support for the Raspberry Pi 5.

Andrea explained with the updated patch series:

"This patchset adds minimal support for the Broadcom BCM2712 SoC and for the on-board SDHCI controller on Broadcom BCM2712 in order to make it possible to boot (particularly) a Raspberry Pi 5 from SD card and get a console through uart. Changes to arm64/defconfig are not needed since the actual options work as they are. This work is heavily based on downstream contributions.

Tested on Tumbleweed substituting the stock kernel with upstream one, either chainloading uboot+grub+kernel or directly booting the kernel from 1st stage bootloader."

The new patches can be found on the Linux kernel mailing list. Hopefully these initial Raspberry Pi 5 boot patches get mainlined soon and that the Raspberry Pi Foundation eventually gets around to more actively upstreaming new SBC support into the mainline kernel.