Fedora 24 for AArch64
The Fedora ARM Team is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 24 for AArch64, ready to run on your next generation servers. Fedora 24 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 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
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 |  |
Tested with edk2.git-aarch64-0-20160504.b1747.gf143074.noarch. | ||||||
| Applied Micro X-Gene (Mustang) | |
|
Tested with APM Tianocore - 1.15.10. | |||||
| Advanced Micro Devices Opteron A1100 (Seattle) | |
|
Tested with 74E firmware. |
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
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 for AArch64 installation tree below:
Installation Tree
http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/24/Server/aarch64/os/
Install with QEMU
You will need to use qemu-2.3.0-4+ for the below to work.
To use Fedora 24 on QEMU you will need to use 'edk2-20160418gita8c39ba-1' (currently in f24-updates) or later.
sudo dnf install edk2-aarch64 libguestfs-tools-c
To install:
sudo virt-install \
--name Fedora_24_AArch64 --ram 4096 --arch aarch64 \
--disk size=8 --os-variant fedora22 \
--location https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/24/Server/aarch64/os/
*Add kickstart with (root password is 'fedora'):
--extra-args "inst.ks=https://pwhalen.fedorapeople.org/kickstarts/Fedora-24-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
- 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).