Architectures/ARM/Raspberry Pi

This page is a work in progress the Raspberry Pi isn't yet supported

Introduction

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized ARM based single board computer (SBC). Fedora supports the the Raspberry Pi Model B versions 2 and 3 in Fedora 25 Beta and later without any requirement of third party kernels or scripts to adjust offical images. This documentation describes how to get started, and includes a Fequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about what is supported and what isn't.

Supported Hardware

We currently only support the Raspberry Pi Model B versions 2 and 3.

Prerequisites

• A Raspberry Pi 2 or 3
• Good quality SD Card (eLinux hosts a compatibility list)
• HDMI Monitor or TV, a USB keyboard and mouse
• A decent power supply. You'll want at least 2A for the RPi2 and 2.5A for the RPi3 details here

For preparation of the SD card:

• Computer running Windows/MacOS/Linux
• SD card reader

Downloading the Fedora ARM image

As the support for the Raspberry Pi is coming with Fedora 25 currently we have nightly images. The Fedora 25 Beta will support it.

The latest nightly images can be downloaded here:

• Fedora Workstation
• Fedora Server
• Minimal and other Desktop SPINs

Preparing the SD card

You can quite easily prepare the image on the SD card on Fedora or any linux distribution, MacOS or Windows. The default settings will provide the user interface on a HDMI monitor with keyboard and mouse support. If you wish to have output over a serial console please see Section in the FAQ.

Fedora or other Linux Distributions

Scripted

• Use the fedora-arm-image-installer

dnf update install fedora-arm-installer

Usage: fedora-arm-image-installer <options>

   --image=IMAGE    - xz compressed image file name
   --target=TARGET  - target board
   --media=DEVICE   - media device file (/dev/[sdX|mmcblkX])
   --selinux=ON/OFF - Turn SELinux off/on as needed
   --norootpass     - Remove the root password
   -y		    - Assumes yes, will not wait for confirmation
   --version	    - Display version and exit
   --resizefs	    - Resize root filesystem to fill media device
   --addconsole     - Add system console to extlinux.conf

Example: fedora-arm-image-installer --image=Fedora-Rawhide.xz --target=rpi2 --media=/dev/mmcblk0 --selinux=OFF

Manual

 xzcat Fedora-Rawhide.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX # Location of your media

MacOS

The Raspberry Pi foundation provides some nice instructions for image copying using a Mac here. Simply replace any image file references with the name and path of the image downloaded in the step above.

Microsoft Windows

The Raspberry Pi foundation provides some nice instructions for image copying using a Windows here. Simply replace any image file references with the name and path of the image downloaded in the step above.

Booting Fedora on the Raspberry Pi for the first time

• Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi.
• Make sure you have a keyboard, mouse, network cable and monitor connected.
• Power on the Raspberry Pi.
• You will see Fedora booting and eventually the "Initial setup wizard" will appear.
• Follow the wizard to set language, timezone and create users.
• You should be presented with a login prompt or a getting started guide (depending on which Desktop/SPIN you're using).

Applying updates and installing software

There are no special ways or procedures necessary to install or update the software so you just use standard Fedora installation and update mechanisms such as dnf, gnome-software or any of the other GUI update systems as supported in the various desktop environments.

Getting help and reporting issues

So where can you get help if it’s not working? The usual Fedora support forums are:

• Ask Fedora
• Fedora ARM mailing list
• IRC via the #fedora-arm channel on Freenode

Frequently Asked Questions

What desktop environments are supported?

Both 3D/2D work out of the box and all desktops as shipped in Fedora should work just fine. There is an open source fully accelerated driver for the Video Core IV GPU.

Will there be more enhancements to the hardware support

Yes. New enhancements will be delivered when, and as soon as, they are ready via the standard Fedora updates mechanism. New significate features will be blogged about as they arrive either via Fedora Magazine or the Fedora Planet.

Support for the Raspberry Pi Models A, A+, B (generation 1), Zero and Compute Module

Fedora doesn't support ARMv6 processors. There's been a number of attempts to support these over the years. The current best effort is Pingus based on Fedora 23. More information can be found at the Pignus site. We will support the new Compute Module 3 based on the same SoC as the Raspberry Pi 3 when it starts to ship.

When will support for Fedora 24 or 23 arrive?

It likely won't. The small team is focused on the Fedora 25 development version and rawhide to best focus resources. While possible to do there is reasonably significant amount of work to back port all the fixes that have gone into Fedora 25/rawhide back to stable releases. Fedora 25 is due in mid November and is already very stable on the Raspberry Pi.

What USB devices are supported on the Raspberry Pi

You should be able to use most USB-2 compatible devices that are supported in Fedora on other devices. There are some limitations to the USB bus of the Raspberry Pi hardware as documented here.

Is the onboard WiFi and Bluetooth supported on the Raspberry Pi 3?

Wifi:

No currently, there's a number of reasons for this:

• Initially the firmware required for the device wasn't redistributable. This was resolved on September 14th when the firmware landed upstream in the linux-firmware repository!
• The SDIO interface which the WiFi module uses to connect to isn't yet upstream.
• Some other support patches are missing.

It initially wasn't a focus due to the inability to redistribute the firmware. With the work now complete for initial support for the overall Pi now complete this will be easy to deliver as a standard Fedora update at some point in the future when the kernel pieces look sane.

Bluetooth:

In theory yes as it's attached to a serial port and is accessible. In practice it tends to crash the entire device so is not currently recommended. For the brave you can enable it with this command:

hciattach /dev/ttyAMA0 bcm43xx 3000000 noflow -

Why doesn't sound work?

Support for the sound output via HDMI or though the analog port is not yet supported in the upstream kernel. This is one of the big items on the ToDo list. Audio output via a USB audio interface should work fine.

Does the add-on camera work?

Not currently. There is still ongoing work to support this upstream and add the appropriated media acceleration support.

Does accelerated media decode work?

No. There's no upstream kernel support and it relies on code from a number of kernel subsystems to be supported.

Does HDMI-CEC work?

Yes. It current is supported using libcec packaged in Fedora.

Are display outputs other than HDMI supported?

Work on the official Raspberry Pi Touch Display is ongoing upstream and initial support might land as soon as the 4.9 kernel. Fedora will enable that support as soon as is reasonable and it is usable. Support for other displays is not currently planned.

Are the expansion HATs supoorted?

The quick answer here is they are not currently supported.

The long answer is a lot more complex. Most of the hardware interfaces that are exposed by the 40 pin HAT connector are supported with drivers shipped with Fedora. Drivers for the hardware contained on a lot of the common HATs are also enabled and supported in Fedora. The core means of supporting the HAT add-on boards require the use of device tree overlays. The kernel and the u-boot 2016.09 boot-loader supports the loading over overlays manually. Currently there is no upstream consensus on the means of autoloading these overlays by means of an "overlay manager" (also known as Cape Manger and by numerous other names) by reading the EEPROM ID and loading the appropriate overlay automatically. There's also no consensus on the extensions to the dtc (Device Tree Compiler) to build the binary blob overlays, and no consensus of the exact format of the overlay file. There is now a group of people working to resolve this issue which enable Fedora to better support HATs (Raspberry Pi), Capes (BeagleBone), DIPs (C.H.I.P) and Mezzanine (96boards) before long.

The first focus HAT to support will be the official Raspberry Pi Sense HAT. This will be documented using the manual process to build and load the overlay to provide access to the onboard devices as a means of demonstrating how this process works for those wishing to use this manual method in the interim. The link to this documentation will be added here once that is complete.

Raspberry Pi 3 aarch64 support

The focus for Fedora 25 with the limited time and resources available, was to provide a polished experience with a single disk image for both the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. At the time the work started it wasn't clear whether the aarch64 kernel support would land upstream in time. The intention is to officially support the Raspberry Pi 3 as an aarch64 device in Fedora 26. There has been significant enabling work in Fedora 25 but there is still quite a bit more work to do to finish the aarch64 support at time of writing.

How do I use a serial console?

The serial console is disabled by default on the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 because it requires the device to run at significantly slower speeds. To enable the serial console follow the specific steps for the Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 as they both differ slightly:

Raspberry Pi 2:

• insert steps here

Raspberry Pi 3:

• insert steps here