Fedora May Finally Provide Official Support For The Raspberry Pi 4

[mether]

I know what I wrote. They are only BEGINNING to give a nod to support. The change request was written by a Fedora dev who is a Red Hat employee (most of the Fedora project managers are). He has been working on Fedora over 15 years, as indicated by his bio. To say that Red Hat and Fedora are independent is a bit naive.

I didn't say they are independent, I said Fedora developers working on a proposal does not mean Red Hat is giving any kind of nod or support at all. It is often the case that developers work on feature requests out of personal interest and in the absence of a specific business case, it isn't safe to assume that developers working on something indicates the beginning of anything of anything from any vendor especially when developers have been involved upstream for a long time already.

[You-]

I think a lot of people are misunderstanding this, and it is being pushed in an opaque way too.

Fedora only includes free software and before kernel 5.19/5.20 there was no support for the pi4 GPU in the upstream kernel. Hence fedora could not officially support it.

Getting the software upstream has been a multi year effort by multiple interested parties, and having Fedora (and all future standard distributions, even the next Debian) be able to support it out of the box is a result of that.

Lets hope there is enough interest to get an open wifi driver upstreamed too.

[MastaG]

I didn't say they are independent, I said Fedora developers working on a proposal does not mean Red Hat is giving any kind of nod or support at all. It is often the case that developers work on feature requests out of personal interest and in the absence of a specific business case, it isn't safe to assume that developers working on something indicates the beginning of anything of anything from any vendor especially when developers have been involved upstream for a long time already.

Right so the Raspberry Pi foundation failed miserably at getting all of their features working upstream then.
I mean come on, it has been out for 3 years already and their Raspbian thing still relies on a heavily patched and outdated kernel.
Furthermore they still ship the proprietary GPU drivers as the default instead of the KMS + mesa stuff.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

The Fedora people (who are mostly Red Hat employees who work on-the-clock) have their own goals of getting a full Linux distribution working and supported on real hardware, rather than worrying about whether or not it works as a niche user-mode container on someone else's OS and kernel.

Your entire reply can basically be boiled down to herp derp.

• WSL and WSLg can be a gateway for folks to try out new distributions, and increasing the funnel of users interested in Fedora is a good thing.
• RHEL is the 800 pound gorilla of Linux servers. Giving employees who must use Windows for whatever reason a great option to stay in the RHEL family inside WSL is a good thing.
• The effort to accomplish this is relatively small.
• Fedora was (is?) actually interested in doing this, but it stalled due to legal terms years ago.
• WSL 2 is using an actual Linux kernel.
• Something that is "niche" on Windows can be a larger user base than all of "desktop Linux".

[mangeek]

Does Ubuntu ship with gpu acceleration and everything working?

Ubuntu produces a Raspberry Pi specific build, it has its own kernel source, bootloader, etc..

Previously, using Fedora on RPI needed you to use the ARM64 install over a UEFI-on-RPI 'fake firmware' and it got you a system with unaccelerated graphics.

I think that theoretically, if all the RPI hardware is supported upstream, both distros could fall back to using generic ARM64 installs on the UEFI-on-RPI stuff, then there would be less work all around...

...until the next Raspberry Pi comes out and it takes four years to upstream drivers.

[binarybanana]

I bet all you have to do is unpack a Fedora base system on a partition or run the debootstrap equivalent on it, point the kernel to the partition and it'll work. Dunno how Pi's boot loader works, my SBCs use uboot and have a separate /boot partition with a kernel and device tree files. A simple text file contains the kernel boot parrmeters.

Usually even the vendor kernel should work if you're not compiling your own and the distro doesn't have the right one. I just used armbian's stuff to bootstrap things in the past. Kernel modules might make this a bit more complicated if they have to loaded in an initramfs stage, but not much. The vendor initramfs (or armbian's) will probably work for this too, though.

That's just my experience, so YMMV. Or you might consider this too much of a hack. Maybe you're right about that.

[JEBjames]

Michael

Typos

"support a,d other" should be "support and other"

[Michael]

Michael

Typos

"support a,d other" should be "support and other"

Thanks

[You-]

I bet all you have to do is unpack a Fedora base system on a partition

With Fedora 37, essentially yes. With Fedora 36 and earlier, no, as you would need a custom kernel. Now with support being upstreamed (for everything except wifi), the plan should be that it works out of the box without any special sauce.

It is worth advertising this change because it is a huge change in how things work(ed).

[Waethorn]

Your entire reply can basically be boiled down to herp derp.

• WSL and WSLg can be a gateway for folks to try out new distributions, and increasing the funnel of users interested in Fedora is a good thing.
• RHEL is the 800 pound gorilla of Linux servers. Giving employees who must use Windows for whatever reason a great option to stay in the RHEL family inside WSL is a good thing.
• The effort to accomplish this is relatively small.
• Fedora was (is?) actually interested in doing this, but it stalled due to legal terms years ago.
• WSL 2 is using an actual Linux kernel.
• Something that is "niche" on Windows can be a larger user base than all of "desktop Linux".

Fedora won't do this precisely because of the license issues with WSL and the restrictions with putting it into the Microsoft Store. This is why people prefer Fedora over Ubuntu, and their fast-and-loose use of open source licensing to their own benefit (ZFS anyone?). There is no RHEL for WSL. WSL2 uses Microsoft's kernel, not Fedora's. This introduces a whole bunch of quality and support issues that they clearly don't want to deal with. If you think that Linux will more than double their marketshare because of WSL (this is precisely what you're saying in your last statement), you need to have your head examined.