Supporting Fedora 24 on the Raspberry Pi 2

So I get asked the question dozens of times a day so I thought I’d outline the answer to the question “When is Fedora going to support the Raspberry Pi 2?” and “The kernel support is upstream in the 4.5 kernel, why isn’t it enabled in Fedora 24?”

Ultimately support in the kernel is great, it’s obviously a core blocker, and the first steps to supporting a new piece of hardware in Fedora. The thing is that when people say kernel support is easy they are partially right but it’s only a very small part of what’s needed to support a complex device such has an ARMv7 Single Board Computer for the average user, especially one as popular as the Raspberry Pi! To make the device work with Fedora we could just enable the kernel bits but it doesn’t make for a good user experience OOTB (Out Of The Box).

With a lot of ARMv7 devices these days a new device comes out and it just works with Fedora. It’s awesome when I read a report, or someone tells me “I tried device X with Fedora and it just worked”. That’s because of a lot of work Fedora, and others, have done to ensure upstream boot loaders and boot process just works with new devices. It’s taken a long time to get us to this point. The Raspberry Pi is sadly not like all the other ARMv7 or aarch64 devices. It doesn’t have a standard boot process, doesn’t use u-boot or uEFI, needs vFAT partitions, firmware, text config files and other things that none of our other supported devices need. All of these differences need to be taken into account.

So in terms of the support being upstream in 4.5 the answer to that is it’s “mostly” upstream, there’s still a bunch of patches we’d need to pull in to ensure a nice OOTB experience. This isn’t a blocker in my opinion, it’s something that’s relatively straight foward with most of the bits already headed upstream into 4.6 so it’s a short term issue.

For the rest of the bits what do I consider a nice out of the box experience? This:

  • A single image to support the Raspberry Pi and all out devices (more on that below)
  • Graphics and USB support from boot to login
  • Most basic peripherals working, at a minimum USB (inc keyboard/mouse), HDMI, wired ethernet, a decent selection of wireless USB dongles, storage (MMC and USB) and preferably sound (analog, digital HDMI, mic)
  • A means of easily creating a bootable SD card from at least the Fedora command line, and probably Windows or MacOSX
  • Good documentation, FAQ etc

Single Image:
We currently produce a lot of different images for ARMv7 like Workstation, Server, Minimal and various desktops. If we had to double the amount of images we make to add vFAT that would double the work needed by QA, rel-eng and also lead to confusion by end users as to which image is needed. I have no intention of doubling anyone’s work, or adding confusion for end users, there needs to be a proper engineering solution to this problem!

Serial Console
A number of people have said to me “just enable it and tell them to use the serial console” but having been working on ARMv7 for over 6 years now I know from experience that this leads to vast amounts of confusion by end users as to why “it’s not working” and it leads to a lot of time “providing support” to end users. With a device such as the Raspberry Pi this will become an order of magnitude worse which won’t provide users a good Fedora experience, and likely drive the people who are trying to support the device a even more nuts than normal!

Basic peripheral support
I feel that network, storage, display, input and sound, although I’m still on the fence about sound, are the minimum viable supported peripherals needed for a good OOTB experience for users.

I know that initially we won’t support HATs very well, you can already copy around device tree overlays in the /sys filesystem for basic support, but upstream still hasn’t finalised what a good experience will look like in this regard. I think we can live with this. This won’t stop the use of I2C or SPI devices connected to the 40 pin header, most of these should work just fine.

Image to card creation
Closely related to the single image and basic peripheral support I think the ability to easily create an image to use is important. I’m not sure we’re going to be able to easily solve the Windows/OSX problem, although to be honest I’ve not looked at what’s out there and we might be able to extend LiveUSBCreator here.

Raspberry Pi 3
So when will we support this? Well the kernel support hasn’t been released yet, at least that I could find at the time of writing this. That being said I don’t think it’ll be a particularly evasive or large patch set, the hardware around the Cortex-A53 is the same, so it’ll be just some glue and a pinctrl driver to make all the bits work together, likely not too dissimilar to other recent SoCs that have gained ARMv8 support. This won’t land in 4.6 as the major changes are already queued to land in that, so likely 4.7 will be the earliest upstream kernel. The wireless on the other hand could be more interesting.

So basically the work needed for support of the Raspberry Pi 3, with a proper 64 bit OS 😉 , shouldn’t be too hard once the kernel bits are upstream.

Firmwares
The other issue we had was the legal ability to redistribute the “GPU boot loader firmware” thankfully that problem was resolved about a year ago, although it did take us over 2 years to do so!

The other firmware issue which will cause problems with Raspberry Pi 3 support is that the Broadcom wireless is notoriously terrible, as any Linux running Mac user will contest to, and their wireless firmware isn’t re-distributable in the standard process of being included in the upstream linux-firmware. With luck this is something that the Raspberry Pi Foundation could assist Broadcom in improving!

Summary
So we’re well on the way to adding support. Assistance in the issues above would be very welcome, whether for supporting a single image or adding support for writing images for the Pi, to help us get the bits done sooner rather than later. Feel free to reach out to me on IRC (pbrobinson on Libera.Chat) or some other means.