RaspberryPi"

About this Howto

This documentation is about using Raspberry Pi Foundation downstream kernel and components from Fedora userspace. The Workstation flavor is recommended for the Raspberry Pi 4 B/400 with >=4GB RAM platform. The Server flavor is usable on starting from Raspberry Pi 3 B/B+.

Kickstart files

Kickstart files are located at https://pagure.io/fork/dwrobel/fedora-kickstarts repository and are based on the original Fedora 36 files with the following modifications:

• component	Repositories	comment
  kernel	spec / copr	Downstream kernel
  bcm434xx-firmware	spec / copr
  bcm283x-firmware	spec / copr
  pykickstart	PR / copr	Adds --priority=<priority>
  livecd-tools	PR / copr	Adds support for repository 'priority' configuration

The modifications in livecd-tools and pykickstart allows to generate image with selected downstream kernel (despite it has lower version) over the upstream one. On a system, all aforementioned repositories are installed with priority=50 option to instruct 'dnf' to choose packages from this repository, rather then Fedora default.

Pre-built images (f36)

The location of pre-generated images for Fedora 36 can be found below:

Pre-built images (f35)

The location of pre-generated images for Fedora 35 can be found below:

Updating Raspberry Pi 4 bootloader EEPROM

Follow the gist available at: https://gist.github.com/dwrobel/266ad5d4e59b05ea26d8bb6725118578.

Configurations

Booting from external USB drive

Write the image to the external drive, then mount the filesystem and change root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 to root=/dev/sda2 in the /boot/efi/cmdline.txt.

Resizing filesystem

After booting the system, please consider to resize the filesystem. The following example assumes system booted from internal SD card.

sudo growpart -u on /dev/mmcblk0 2
sudo btrfs filesystem resize max /

Sysctl (RPi 3 only)

# set vm.min_free_kbytes for rpi
cat>/etc/sysctl.d/98-rpi.conf<<EOF
vm.min_free_kbytes = 16384
EOF

Known issues

uboot-tools prevents clean update of kernel packages

The "/usr/lib/kernel/install.d/10-devicetree.install" script from uboot-tools package prevents older kernel packages from being removed cleanly during update:

  Erasing          : kernel-core-5.10.35-1.rpi.fc33.armv7hl
  warning: file /lib/modules/5.10.35-1.rpi.fc33.armv7hl/modules.builtin.alias.bin: remove failed: No such file or directory

To mitigate it run the following command:

$ echo "FIRMWAREDT=True" | sudo tee /etc/u-boot.conf

CMA memory allocation issue with graphics on the Pi3 using vc4

• The best is to disable vc4 (will be unaccelerated).

Bug Report

• Downstream bugs on the kernel can be reported to https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/

CategoryHowto