Architectures/AArch64/F24/Installation

Fedora 24 Alpha for AArch64

The Fedora ARM Team is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 24 Alpha for AArch64, ready to run on your next generation servers. Fedora 24 Alpha is a game-changer for the Fedora Project, and we think you're going to be very pleased with the results.

Highlights in the Fedora 24 Alpha AArch64 Release

Fedora Server

FreeIPA 4.3 (Domain Controller role) is included in Fedora 24. This version helps streamline installation of replicas by adding a replica promotion method for new installs. A new topology plugin has also been added that automatically manages new replication segment creation. An effective replica topology visualization tool is also available in the webUI.

More packages have been removed from the default Server edition to make the footprint of the default installation smaller.

Fedora-Wide Changes

As with every Fedora release, almost every component has a new version, with improvements across the board.

Under the hood, glibc has moved to 2.23. The update includes better performance, many bugfixes and improvements to POSIX compliance, and additional locales. The new library is backwards compatible with the version of glibc that was shipped in Fedora 23, and includes a number of security and bug fixes.

We've also updated the system compiler to GCC 6 and rebuilt all packages with that, providing greater code optimization and catching programming errors which had slipped past previous compilers.

Mirror List

• https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/mirrors/Fedora/24/aarch64

Supported Hardware

• Applied Micro X-Gene (Mustang)
• Hardware virtualization with QEMU

Overview of Hardware Support Status

Hardware	ACPI	Network	USB	DVD	Display	Audio	Link	Notes
Hardware virtualization with QEMU		pass					none	Tested with edk2.git-aarch64-0-20160322.b1624.g36e8e69.noarch.
Applied Micro X-Gene (Mustang)		pass	pass	none			none	Tested with APM Tianocore - 1.15.10.

Network Installation

A network installation is the preferred installation method for current Aarch64 hardware targets. In order to begin you will need to setup the installation server, a guide can be found below:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/23/html/Installation_Guide/chap-pxe-server-setup.html

Note
The above documentation references grubx86.efi, but this is the name for x86_64 EFI grub binaries. The grub binary name on AArch64 systems is grubaa64.efi.

Once configured use the Fedora 24 Alpha for AArch64 installation tree below:

Installation Tree

http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/test/24_Alpha/Server/aarch64/os/

Install with QEMU

Note
You will need to use qemu-2.3.0-4+ for the below to work.

To use Fedora 24 Alpha on QEMU you will need to use a build of UEFI that is not hosted by Fedora for licensing reasons. For convenience a dnf|yum repository had been created

sudo curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/firmware.repo https://www.kraxel.org/repos/firmware.repo
sudo dnf install edk2.git-aarch64 libguestfs-tools-c

To install:

sudo virt-install    \
      --name Fedora_24_Alpha_AArch64 --ram 4096 --arch aarch64 \
      --boot loader_ro=yes,loader_type=pflash,loader=/usr/share/edk2.git/aarch64/QEMU_EFI-pflash.raw,nvram_template=/usr/share/edk2.git/aarch64/vars-template-pflash.raw    \
      --disk size=8 --os-variant fedora22   \
      --location https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/test/24_Alpha/Server/aarch64/os/
*Add kickstart with (root password is 'fedora'):
      --extra-args "inst.ks=https://pwhalen.fedorapeople.org/kickstarts/Fedora-24-Alpha-Minimal-AArch64.ks"

For a full list of QEMU installation options and instructions:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/AArch64/Install_with_QEMU

Reported Bugs and Known Issues

• Common F24 bugs

• When using an encrypted partition, "plymouth.enable=0" must be added to the kernel command line. Failure to do so will not allow the passphrase to be entered to unlock the encrypted partition. (BZ#1172740).
• After installation on the Mustang, you must update the boot entry in UEFI to boot from 'grubaa64.efi' instead of the default 'shim.efi'. Failure to do so will result in an error when unpacking the initrd (BZ#1309147).