Changes/RaspberryPi4

Officially Support Raspberry Pi 4

This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

Summary

The work around Raspberry Pi 4 has been on going for a number of years, but we've never officially supported it due to lack of accelerated graphics and other key features. A few of us have led the push to get the accelerated graphics work over the line upstream so it now makes sense to enable this in Fedora and make support for the Raspberry Pi 4 more official.

Owner

• Name: Peter Robinson
• Email: pbrobinson@fedoraproject.org

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 37
• Last updated: 2022-07-06
• devel thread
• FESCo issue: <will be assigned by Wrangler>
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by Wrangler>
• Release Notes tracker: <will be assigned by Wrangler>

Detailed Description

The support for the Raspberry Pi ecosystem has been an ongoing evolution. The aim of this change is to support the Raspberry Pi 4 including the 4B, the 400 and the CM4 with IO board. Upstream now supports accelerated graphics using the V3D GPU for both OpenGL-ES and Vulkan. There's also enhancement to wired networking with support for PTPv2 on the CM4/4B.

This work will polish the support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and include some wider general improvements to the Raspberry Pis that we officially support which include the RPi3 series and the Zero2W.

There are some minor caveats here:

• Support for WiFi on the Raspberry Pi 400 is out of scope as it's dependent on the engagement (in this case the lack of) the vendor, Synaptics, of the WiFi module shipped on this device providing generic upstream firmware.

• The Raspberry Pi CM4 is an a module designed for IoT, Edge and Embedded use cases. We will test and support the CM4 on the official IO board, it should work on other devices that incorporate the CM4 assuming the vendor has their support in the upstream Raspberry Pi firmware/overlays.

• Further device support around audio and other such pieces will be reviewed as part of the process.

Benefit to Fedora

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.

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • Ensure any patches required are accepted upstream
  • Work with kernel, mesa and other maintainers to ensure everything is as it should be
  • Test

• Other developers:
  • No direct impact, those already using the device in non-graphical use cases should see no impact.

• Release engineering: #10872
  • List of deliverables: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

There is no upgrade impact. Those running Fedora on the Raspberry Pi 4 previously will, depending on their use case, get an enhanced experience.

How To Test

• Buy a Raspberry Pi 4 (if you can)
• Test your favourite aarch64 Edition, Spin in particular the desktop environments such as Workstation.

User Experience

The experience should now include fully accelerated graphics.

Dependencies

No external dependencies outside of specific work relating to the specified hardware.

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: None
• Contingency deadline: GA
• Blocks release? No.
• Blocks product? No.

Documentation

Update the Raspberry Pi FAQ and other documentation including migrating it to docs.fedoraproject.org

Release Notes

Fedora now supports the Raspberry Pi 4!