The Fedora 39 Release Has Been Held Up By Raspberry Pi Bugs

Fedora 39 failed to make its "early" release target date, it didn't meet its otherwise targeted release date one week later, and is now facing another possible setback still. These release delays have been due to outstanding blocker bugs all related to the Raspberry Pi.

One of the blocker bugs is Bug 2241252 that is about U-Boot failing to load the kernel provided DeviceTrees from /boot. For the Raspberry Pi 4 booting of Fedora Workstation 39 this means booting to a blank screen.

The other blocker is Bug 2244305 and is about Fedora Server 39 not booting on a Raspberry Pi 4 from the microSD card slot.

Rather than potentially slipping the release of Fedora 39 by another week or longer due to these Raspberry Pi issues, Fedora QA is now looking at possibly shipping Fedora 39 with these known Raspberry Pi defects and simply alerting users to these known issues. Raspberry Pi users in the interim would be best off sticking to Fedora 38. The problems may take some time to resolve and rather than keeping Fedora 39 away for everyone else, simply release and warn Raspberry Pi users. It also looks like Bug 224305 might not be easily fixable without some magic by ARM engineers.

So the plan laid out today is to spin Fedora 39 compose images right now, carry out as much last minute testing as possible before tomorrow's Go/No-Go meeting, and potentially proceed to release next week with these known Raspberry Pi issues. We'll know in about twenty four hours from now whether it's all good for releasing Fedora 39 next week or will slip into November.