Fedora May Finally Provide Official Support For The Raspberry Pi 4

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora May Finally Provide Official Support For The Raspberry Pi 4

For as popular as the Raspberry Pi 4 has been since its 2019 launch, Fedora hasn't officially supported this Arm single board computer with its Linux distribution. But now thanks to the upstream, open-source graphics acceleration finally coming together for the Raspberry Pi 4, with Fedora 37 they may end up finally providing "official" support for this popular, low-cost developer board...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-37-Raspberry-Pi-4

[MastaG]

Being the most popular SBC out there and they still lack Wifi and audio in upstream Linux?

[jorgepl]

Does Ubuntu ship with gpu acceleration and everything working?

[Alexmitter]

The Broadcom SoC just really is a weird case. Its a GPU with a CPU as co-processor. When it boots, the first thing that happens is that the GPU starts executing some code that bootstraps the CPU and then loads in the actual boot loader.

Devices that boot in a normal way, with a standard Uboot on the SPI already work great with the Aarch64 iso from Fedora. Starting Uboot, loading efi grub and just as on x86 installation are wonderful. For example this just works on the Pinebook Pro.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

How about official WSL support while we are at it? It always feels weird having choices among Ubuntu / Debian / SLES / OpenSUSE (Leap & Tumbleweed) / etc. but no Fedora.

[Waethorn]

This is the sad state of affairs with ARM on Linux. Raspberry Pi 4 is 3 years old, and it's only just beginning to get the a nod from the biggest Linux vendor there is. When a new ARM SoC launches in product form on a commercialized SBC, so launches a multi-year public beta-test for Linux support. This just doesn't happen with x86. ARM does nothing for the Linux ecosystem besides fracturing it into multiple hardware-specific distros that easily wind up in the void (remember "C.H.I.P."?)

[Waethorn]

How about official WSL support while we are at it? It always feels weird having choices among Ubuntu / Debian / SLES / OpenSUSE (Leap & Tumbleweed) / etc. but no Fedora.

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.

[NateHubbard]

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.

There probably isn't any money to be made getting Fedora running on a Raspberry Pi.

[RahulSundaram]

This is the sad state of affairs with ARM on Linux. Raspberry Pi 4 is 3 years old, and it's only just beginning to get the a nod from the biggest Linux vendor there is

You are probably misunderstanding this and it is not likely to be any Linux vendor driven at all. Fedora proposing this feature is driven by a developer likely working on this out of personal interest. Red Hat is an enterprise vendor and has no commercial interest in SBC's. Fedora does not ship third party kernel modules and avoids making distro specific enhancements. Therefore, work was being done to add support upstream before Fedora can call anything officially supported.

[Waethorn]

You are probably misunderstanding this and it is not likely to be any Linux vendor driven at all. Fedora proposing this feature is driven by a developer likely working on this out of personal interest. Red Hat is an enterprise vendor and has no commercial interest in SBC's. Fedora does not ship third party kernel modules and avoids making distro specific enhancements. Therefore, work was being done to add support upstream before Fedora can call anything officially supported.

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.