Fedora May Finally Provide Official Support For The Raspberry Pi 4

[Waethorn]

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.

I tried Fedora on a RPI3 a while back (F32 or thereabouts). It was using Fedora's kernel. I could tell by uname and also because Software Center was updating it to the current kernel regularly. Of course, GNOME 3 was dog slow on it. Clicking on anything meant about 3-10 second wait for something to come up, and I'm not even talking about loading a program - just the Activities screen and other UI elements.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

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.

No, and that's not "precisely" what I said at all. I was laughing at your "niche" comment. Windows 10 / 11 have roughly 1.5 billion active (desktop) devices in the wild. Even features targeted at developers like WSL which aren't intended to be used by everyone can have a very large user base. There's a certain absurdity about a "desktop Linux" user writing off something like WSL as a non-viable market opportunity.

[Waethorn]

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.

All of the firmware for RPi is fake. UEFI doesn't fix the issue of driver support in the OS though, although it should - I always advocated that UEFI firmware should fully enable OS support of hardware since UEFI is its own OS, written in C...and then you have the dreaded Intel ME, which is ALSO an OS...this stuff is designed so poorly nowadays...OS's on OS's on OS's, memory upon memory upon memory...buffers upon buffers upon buffers. It's the old stone wheel paradigm, but we shouldn't be thinking about reinventing it, instead replacing it with an anti-grav hovercar by now.

For the cost of a Raspberry Pi with all the necessary accessories to run it (case, fan, heatsinks, SD card, power cable, etc.) it's still cheaper to buy a prebuilt no-name brand Celeron mini-PC off of a site like Amazon, and you'd get faster performance and better out-of-box support (assuming WiFi is a Linux-supported controller, although many will just use a cheap Intel WiFi chip). And there are Intel SBC's with cheap chips on them too.

[LoveRPi]

Raspberry Pi has never offered a bootloader that comply with standards. They stick to everything their way and the hardware is obsolete.

[Waethorn]

• Something that is "niche" on Windows can be a larger user base than all of "desktop Linux".

You said exactly that whatever is equal to desktop Linux will have a niche on Windows of a larger user base, hence double, and then some. Do you not even understand the math behind your own statement?

[nist]

For me, support means also "3d" and "full hardware video decoding". At the moment, the hvec 10 bit support is still missing with the latest official OS, while it can well support it. Blender is inusable now

[binarybanana]

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).

That's what I meant with vendor/armbian's kernel. Of course, compiling your own works, too.

I tried Fedora on a RPI3 a while back (F32 or thereabouts). It was using Fedora's kernel. I could tell by uname and also because Software Center was updating it to the current kernel regularly. Of course, GNOME 3 was dog slow on it. Clicking on anything meant about 3-10 second wait for something to come up, and I'm not even talking about loading a program - just the Activities screen and other UI elements.

I'm actually surprised it booted and worked at all with the Fedora kernel. But yes, graphics being slow is a given without proper graphics driver in kernel/mesa.

[Waethorn]

That's what I meant with vendor/armbian's kernel. Of course, compiling your own works, too.



I'm actually surprised it booted and worked at all with the Fedora kernel. But yes, graphics being slow is a given without proper graphics driver in kernel/mesa.

I also credit slow booting to the anemic speeds of the SD card reader. At the time, there was no USB boot.

[Waethorn]

For me, support means also "3d" and "full hardware video decoding". At the moment, the hvec 10 bit support is still missing with the latest official OS, while it can well support it. Blender is inusable now

Same here. If you can't even play web video with hardware video acceleration out of the box without having to tinker with goofy browser options and drivers, let alone get smooth UI of GNOME 3/4, (which includes less graphical effects than Vista Aero from 15 years ago), it's not worthwhile. This is why even the most basic modern x86 PC's are a better option.

[Neraxa]

Now if you can just buy a Raspberry Pi 4 to run it on.