Tag: machine-learning

Initial Minimal Fedora Image for Raspberry Pi 5

I know this has been much awaited because of all the queries on the various forums and direct to me so here we are the first Fedora image that can run a native userspace with a Fedora kernel with some enablement patches.

This image is far from complete and is NOT yet suitable for desktop UXes and related usecases that require a display.

So what works, what doesn’t, and how can you get started?

The things that are working and tested:

  • The original RPi5 rev c0 SoCs: the older 4Gb/8Gb variants
  • Serial console
  • Late boot HDMI0 display output (IE once the kernel has started) via simple DRM/FB
  • The compute Subsystems (CPUs etc) of both SoC revs
  • The micro SD slot – the only supported OS disk ATM
  • Wired ethernet port
  • Wireless network interface
  • USB ports (NOT for OS disks)

The things that don’t work:

  • The new RPi5 rev d0 SoCs: the 2Gb/16Gb, newer 1.1 Rev 4/8Gb variants, the RPi500, CM5 – the kernel will crash on boot
  • Early boot display output
  • Accelerated GPU
  • Basically everything else

What might work:

  • PCIe for HATs via the add-on HATs and related products including NVME. Not currently for boot/root.

For getting started you will need to have a serial console, ATM booting off anything other than the micro SD card won’t work.

We will eventually support booting off USB/NVME etc and display output as well as other HW but unfortunately we’re not there yet. I feel with USB/eth/wifi support the device is now at a point where it’s actually usable for a lot of Fedora users so I decided it’s time to expand this to more people than just me 😀

Note I don’t have the spare cycles to assist with debugging any issues that have been listed above as explicitly not working, I want to spend my time on making the device more usable (SORRY, but I do this in my personal spare time). I will update when any of this changes.

You can get the image from here and get started in the usual way with either DD or arm-image-installer (update the storage media name):

arm-image-installer --resizefs --target=none --media=/dev/XXX --image=rpi5-250907-fedora-43-minimal-raw-xz-aarch64.raw.xz

I am working to get more HW support enabled, my focus is on the d0 rev boards (2Gb, 16Gb, 500, CM5 and newer 4/8Gb) and PCIe, from there I will look at what else is possible with my available time. These enhancements will land in new kernel updates to my copr repo, or fixes into Fedora proper. which will arrive by either new published images or kernel updates. I will provide updates when particularly useful milestones are passed and new things start to work.

Bug reports are of course welcome but not for desktopsm or RFEs for other HW enablement, especially things I’ve already stated above, I am working to get more features but I am limited to what I can do because of available time, upstream work and access to HW docs so please be patient as I am doing this in my spare time! Of course being downstream of Fedora please don’t file bugs there unless they are a general problem with userspace. The only thing that’s not vanilla Fedora currently is the kernel. I have an original Pi 5 8Gb and a Pi 5 rev d0 model I am testing with, everything else can be considered untested so YMMV!

Any Linux distro on NVIDIA Jetson Orin with JetPack 6

NVIDIA has just released the Jetpack 6 for the NVIDIA Jetson Orin hardware. The thing that is most exciting about this release is they finally support the ability to use upstream kernels and other Linux distributions. This means you can start to use both RHEL (9.3 and later) and Fedora on the Jetson Orin hardware! This has been a LONG time coming, something I’ve been involved with for 5 years!

So while this is a developer preview, AKA public Beta, it’s still very usable and for people that are interested in using other Linux distributions now is the time to get stuck in. Like all things it’s not perfect and there’s still work to be done, but many hands do make light work!

You start by downloading the BSP from there you can follow the following instructions and you should end up with a device you can easily install Fedora 39+ or RHEL 9.3 or other distros with the appropriate bits enabled.

To flash the firmware you need to follow the Orin AGX guide for recovery and cabling, for Orin NX/nano you need to use the HW pins near the mSD card, to put the device in recovery mode and cabling then do the following for Orin AGX:

$ sudo dnf install -y libxml2-utils lz4 usbutils xxd
$ tar zvf Jetson_Linux_R36.2.0_aarch64.tbz2
$ cd Linux_for_Tegra/
$ lsusb|grep -i nv
Bus 003 Device 044: ID 0955:7045 NVIDIA Corp. [unknown]
Bus 003 Device 045: ID 0955:7023 NVIDIA Corp. [unknown]
$ sudo ./flash.sh p3737-0000-p3701-0000-qspi external
removed a lot of output
*** The target generic has been flashed successfully. ***
Make the target filesystem available to the device and reset the board to boot from external external.
$

The command for other Orin devices such as NX and Nano will be similar, you’ll just have to swap the p3737 variable, eg for Orin Nano use: sudo ./flash.sh p3737-0000-p3701-0000-qspi external.

Once the flash completes the device will reboot and you will be able to use the usual mechanisms to install your OS, whether the RHEL or Fedora installers or a Fedora Arm image. I’ve tested running OSes off both the microSD and a NVME card, plus installing off USB, the DisplayPort output should work in EFI console mode. The firmware is based upon the widely known TianoCore/EDK2 so the firmware interface should be straight forward. For those that may need a serial console if it’s not automatically detected you can use console=ttyAMA0,115200, This runs off the microUSB port on /dev/ttyACM2 on the host device.

For hardware vendors that have hardware based on the NVIDIA Orin hardware they will be able to adopt and make this available to their customers that may wish to run distributions other than L4T. If they are unsure feel free to reach out to me in the usual locations.

Getting started with OpenCL using mesa/rusticl

Mesa, the open source low level graphics stack, has featured support for Open Compute Language (OpenCL) for some time via a front end called Clover. The problem was that the GPUs that it supported were limited, it didn’t have Image support, and wasn’t really under active development. Around a year ago Karol Herbst filed a merge request adding rusticl to Mesa 22.3 release, and soon after that I enabled it optionally in Fedora.. What is rusticl? It’s a OpenCL API implementation written in rust for Mesa, it will eventually replace clover. One advantage it has is image support from the outset and also works on much wider range of OpenCL capable GPUs, including some ARM GPUs, and the support is actively improving all the time.

In the year since it landed in a stable mesa release rusticl keeps evolving, faster, more HW support, more features, less crashes. I’ve tinkered with it as I’ve had spare time on the weekends and evenings as well as trying to work out details of how you’d use it to run higher level stacks.

As of writing it works with following gallium drivers: iris (Intel), nouveau (Nvidia), radeonsi/r600 (AMD ATI), and panfrost (Arm MALI). There’s other drivers that are various stages of development but are not yet upstream.

So let’s get the basics up and running on Fedora if you have supported hardware. First install the core software stack:

$ sudo dnf install -y mesa-libOpenCL mesa-dri-drivers spirv-llvm-translator spirv-tools-libs clinfo clpeak

Next we run clinfo and clpeak with required parameters, from the driver names above (in this case an Intel laptop), to enable rusticl. The two commands output a lot of information so I’m not going to post them here but the output shows OpenCL running and some details about what’s supported:

$ RUSTICL_ENABLE=iris clinfo --list
WARNING: OpenCL support via iris+clover is incomplete.
For a complete and conformant OpenCL implementation, use
https://github.com/intel/compute-runtime instead
Platform #0: rusticl
 `-- Device #0: Mesa Intel(R) Xe Graphics (TGL GT2)
Platform #1: Portable Computing Language
 `-- Device #0: cpu-11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1185G7 @ 3.00GHz
Platform #2: Clover
$ RUSTICL_ENABLE=iris clinfo
output a lot of details
$ RUSTICL_ENABLE=iris clpeak
output a lot of details

This gets up the basic pieces up and running for OpenCL, there’s of course more to do and not all use cases are complete. Eventually we won’t need to have the environment variables to enable rusticl. The details of drivers and other features enabled by environment variables are documented here. I plan to do some more posts as follow ups to build on this basis.