Fedora 37 To Offer Official Support On Raspberry Pi 4 Devices

A month ago there was the Fedora 37 change proposal for Fedora to officially support the Raspberry Pi 4, including its accelerated Broadcom graphics and to better advertise Fedora for the Raspberry Pi. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now signed off on this "official" support for the Raspberry Pi 4.

The Raspberry Pi 4 to date hasn't been a significant focus for Fedora Workstation due to various patches not being upstreamed-- most notably, waiting on the open-source 3D graphics bits to be upstreamed in the kernel. Now though that those upstream bits are coming together, Fedora 37 will be focusing on advertising its support for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B as well as the Raspberry Pi 400 and Raspberry Pi CM4 compute module.

With the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support, these latest Raspberry Pi boards are suitable for Fedora Workstation usage. The latest milestones there are V3DV just having crossed Vulkan 1.2 and Raspberry Pi 4 V3D DRM/KMS driver support in Linux 6.0. However, there still are upstream issues surrounding WiFi support for the Raspberry Pi 400, the Raspberry Pi CM4 not necessarily being very suitable for desktop use but more edge/IoT/embedded, and some device support such as around audio may be problematic.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is a widely available, reasonably priced device. It has worked well in Fedora for some time in IoT and Server use cases, and now with a fully accelerated graphics stack available it's a great device from a price-per-performance perspective, and it has a wide ecosystem, so fully supporting this in Fedora makes a compelling case.

See the Fedora Wiki for details on this official support for the Raspberry Pi 4 with F37.

The latest news now is that FESCo has formally approved this change for Fedora 37. So all is good to go, assuming the necessary documentation updates are made in time for the Fedora 37 Beta.