Tag: u-boot

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!

Building rust UEFI apps on Fedora

As everyone probably knows rust is considered a great language for secure programming and hence a lot of people are looking at it for everything from low level firmware to GPU drivers. In a similar vein it can already be to build UEFI applications.

Upstream in U-Boot we’ve been adding support for UEFI HTTP and HTTPs Boot and it’s now stable enough I am looking to enable this in Fedora. While I was testing the features on various bits of hardware I wanted a small UEFI app I could pull across a network quickly and easily from a web server for testing devices.

Of course adding in display testing as well would be nice…. so enter UEFI nyan cat for a bit of fun!

Thankfully the Fedora rust toolchain already has the UEFI targets built (aarch64 and x86_64) so you don’t need to mess with third party toolchains or repos, it works the same for both targets, just substitute the one you want in the example where necessary.

I did most of this in a container:

$ podman pull fedora
$ podman run --name=nyan_cat --rm -it fedora /bin/bash
# dnf install -y git-core cargo rust-std-static-aarch64-unknown-uefi
# git clone https://github.com/diekmann/uefi_nyan_80x25.git
# cd uefi_nyan_80x25/nyan/
# cargo build --release --target aarch64-unknown-uefi
# ls target/aarch64-unknown-uefi/release/nyan.efi
target/aarch64-unknown-uefi/release/nyan.efi

From outside the container then copy the binary, and add it to the EFI boot menu:

$ podman cp nyan_cat:/uefi_nyan_80x25/nyan/target/aarch64-unknown-uefi/release/nyan.efi ~/
$ sudo mkdir /boot/efi/EFI/nyan/
$ sudo cp ~/nyan.efi /boot/efi/EFI/nyan/nyan-a64.efi
$ sudo efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/nvme0n1 --part 1 --label "nyan" --loader \\EFI\\nyan\\nyan-a64.efi

Reboot and sit back and enjoy some UEFI Nyan Cat!

Short history of ARMv7/armhfp/arm32 in Fedora

Back in mid November I proposed a change for Fedora 37 to retire ARMv7 as an architecture, FESCo accepted the proposal. Per the Fedora 36 schedule we branched Fedora 36 this week. Last night I enacted the last of the process to disable it in rawhide so to quote “It’s dead Jim”. The last release of Fedora to support ARMv7 AKA armhfp AKA arm32 will be Fedora 36 which will go end of life around June 2023.

I thought I’d cover a few of the things we achieved with Fedora ARM and some of the impact it’s had on the wider Linux on ARM ecosystem which people may not have realised.

First a little bit of ARM history in the Fedora ecosystem. The beginnings of ARM support actually precedes Fedora all the way back to 1998 with a fork of Red Hat Linux 4.2 and more officially with Red Hat Linux 5.1 on the Corel Netwinder (I always wanted one of those but they weren’t available in Aus).

In Fedora itself the earliest details I remember was that Marvell bootstrapped ARMv5 in Fedora 7 and continued to build and support it through to Fedora 12. This “software architecture” was known as softfp. It was optimised for the ARMv5 architecture which didn’t have a hard requirement on a floating point unit so emulated it when it was needed hence “software floating point”. In Fedora 13 Seneca College took over the ARMv5 infrastructure and building from Marvell. I officially got involved in the Fedora 14 build process and soon after was also contracted by OLPC to drive Fedora on OLPC for their ARM based XO laptops as well as work on their i686 devices to have a single OS for all of them.

In mid 2011, the Fedora 15 timeframe, a small Red Hat team started to do a ARMv7 hard floating point, AKA hardfp or armhfp, bootstrap as ARM’s new v7 mandated a floating point unit. The bootstrap included the core toolchain (binutils/gcc/glibc/elfutils and friends) and ultimately the entire distribution, I drove this effort from a community, build and packaging perspective. This required 100s of patches to upstream projects that made many assumptions about ARM only being softfp, but it also allowed us at the time to fix many general architecture assumptions in these projects. The hard floating point bootstrapping was useful for the wider community too, it was used by Nokia as the base of it’s hardfp efforts for Maemo, plus other distros used it as as it’s much easier/quicker if you already have a full distro running the architecture you wish to boostrap. What wasn’t generally known at the time was also the first new architecture that has been bootstrapped in the Fedora/RHEL ecosystem since x86_64 a long time before and it allowed Red Hat to refresh it’s memory on how to do this in preparation of the then unannounced aarch64 architecture and the POWER Little Endian intentions, basically it provided a cover story. We also worked to get other languages such as Fortran, golang, rust and others building and working on armhfp and those other architectures. The final piece of this was ARMv7 being promoted to a primary Fedora architecture in Fedora 20. This then later went on to my proposal to redefine secondary architectures in Fedora.

In the wider community of Linux Fedora ARM was the first distribution to adopt the kernel “multi platform” work enabling us to go from building 5 different kernels to support a handful of arm devices to a single kernel supporting 100s of devices in a very short period of time. I worked with closely Arnd Bergmann from Linaro on issues with the early pieces of the multiplatform work. In upstream U-Boot we posted the first distro_boot patches to support booting Linux in the same way across all the devices we actively supported so we didn’t need specially wrapped kernels and know exact offsets for every SoC or device. The distro_boot support evolved, working with SUSE, into UEFI support in U-Boot further standardising the ARM boot process by abstracting the pieces that were different and letting the firmware deal with them. This work ultimately evolved into EBBR and the ARM System Ready IR spec. In Fedora 34 we moved to soley supporting UEFI on both ARM architectures. A lot of Linux distros still have specific kernels for each device and use non standard boot methods for devices and hence have an image for each device/use-case they wish to use. This was something Fedora identified very early on as something that would not scale!

Fedora also leads a lot of things in the gcc toolchain stack across all our supported architectures, we’ve actively enabled a lot of security features and other things like LTO early on. As the Fedora gcc maintainers, employed by Red Hat, are also key upstream GCC maintainers we’re almost always the first distribution to rebase onto a new release before it’s a stable release, for example Fedora 36 had just had a mass rebuild against a gcc-12 pre release snapshot. This builds all of the 50k or more source packages with the pre-release of the new toolchain making for a much better release for the wider GCC community because this picks up a number of bugs/regressions in both the general support but also in the architectures Fedora supports which means the ARMv7 hardfp support in GCC has benefited from 100s of bugs we’ve detected in gcc/binutils/glibc etc before they land in a stable gcc release. With the retirement of ARMv7 in Fedora this is going to be something the wider ARMv7 community is going to have to pick up post the GCC-12 release.

Over the subsequent 11 years of ARMv7 support in Fedora, and much longer if you include the early ARMv5 the distribution has also enabled a number of other innovative features like support for containers, support for devices like the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 in Fedora 25. as mentioned various toolchains, and fun things like robots. Of course we also lose some things too. Devices like the BeagleBone don’t yet have a 64 bit sibling, but there’s less and less 32 bit devices coming out and the use of armhfp is waning quickly and the maintenance cost is rising as the industry moves more generally to 64 bit even in embedded use cases and the fact is with devices like the $15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2W it makes less and less sense even if I do still actively run BeagleBones, a Panda-ES and 3 different i.MX6 devices.

So I engaged with the wider Arm ecosystem and it made sense to finally sunset our ARMv7 32 bit support. We’re of course leaving it in good shape with things like gcc-12, the latest rust and golang toolchains and 5.17 kernels, much newer by the time F-36 goes EOL in June 2023, it will be in good shape if people wish to use it as the basis of some form of continuing ARMv7 supported Linux distribution.

Sail off into the sunset friend, it’s been a fun 12 years of hacking on those projects!

Fedora on the Pinebook Pro

Note: Some updates for Fedora 40+ with reduced steps.

First thing to note here is that this is not limited to the Pinebook Pro, I’m just using it as the example for 64 bit Rockchip devices with SPI flash on Fedora. This post is focused on devices with SPI but I’ll do a separate follow-up post for other devices including details for writing to eMMC over USB.

The story of Fedora on the Pinebook Pro, and other Rockchip devices, has been a sordid story of a lack of time, bugs, rabbit holes, more bugs and various other things. Not at all sordid at all really, mostly just a lack of time on my behalf, and nobody else stepping up to assist in a way to benefit all Fedora users, mostly they do one time hacks to sort themselves. Overall the support in Fedora for Rockchip devices has been quite solid for a number of releases. The problem has been with the early boot firmware, notable because without SPI flash it wants to splat itself across the first 8Mb of the disk, and if there was SPI flash it generally wasn’t overly stable/straight forward.

Anyway we’re now in a place where devices with SPI flash should mostly work just fine, those devices without it will work with a little manual intervention, and while the support isn’t complete, and will need more polish, they’re all details we can polish with little interruption to users by standard package updates. By default users will have accelerated graphics and from my testing on GNOME 40 it’s by all accounts a pretty decent experience!

Setting up the firmware

First step is to get the firmware written to SPI flash. This is a two step process, the first is to write out a micro SD card from another device, the second is to boot that mSD card on the Pinebook Pro, or another device like the Rockpro64, and write the firmware to the SPI flash.

There’s some nuances to this process, and the way the early boot firmware works, if another version of U-Boot takes precedence that is likely OK as it should still be able to work, the fall back is to use the internal switch to turn off the eMMC temporarily. I also have no idea if the Pine64 shipped U-Boot has any display output, the Fedora build does, if not you’ll need to use the option to disable eMMC or use a serial console cable. Anyway on to the steps:

Set up the mSD card
Use a mSD card that has no data you wish to keep, this process will wipe it out. You want at least U-Boot build 2021.04-3.fc34, you can adjust the umount to be more specific, and you need to substitute XXX for the media, otherwise it’s a relatively quick and straightforward process:

sudo dnf install --enablerepo=updates-testing -y arm-image-installer uboot-images-armv8
sudo umount /run/media/USERNAME/*
sudo spi-flashing-disk --target=pinebook-pro-rk3399 --media=/dev/XXX

Write the firmware to flash
Now remove the mSD card from your host and put it into the Pinebook Pro. Press the power button, from experience you likely need to press and momentarily hold and in a second or two the display will light up with text output. Interrupt the boot by pressing space. Next up we write out the flash:

Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0 
=> ls mmc 1:1
   182272   idbloader.img
   364544   idbloader-spi.img
  1079808   u-boot.itb
  1997312   u-boot-rockchip.bin
  1997312   u-boot-rockchip-spi.bin

5 file(s), 0 dir(s)

=> sf probe
SF: Detected gd25q128 with page size 256 Bytes, erase size 4 KiB, total 16 MiB

=> load mmc 1:1 ${fdt_addr_r} u-boot-rockchip-spi.bin
1997312 bytes read in 39 ms (8.2 MiB/s)

=> sf update ${fdt_addr_r} 0 ${filesize}
device 0 offset 0x0, size 0x52000
61440 bytes written, 274432 bytes skipped in 0.803s, speed 427777 B/s

Once the last command above has completed eject the mSD card and type reset at the => prompt and the device should reboot and you should see output similar to before but running from the SPI flash!

If you had to turn off the eMMC you can now turn it back on.

Installing Fedora

The nice thing with the firmware on SPI flash it should now work mostly like any other laptop and you can use either the pre canned desktop images (Workstation, KDE, XFCE, Sugar), the Workstation LiveCD iso or the standard everything network installer.

To run the arm Workstation image off a micro SD card or USB stick you can do the following:

arm-image-installer --media=/dev/XXX --resizefs --target=none --image=Fedora-Workstation-40-1.13.aarch64.raw.xz

Note ATM you’ll need to use the USB port on the right hand side, I need to investigate the USB/USB-C port on the left as it appears not to currently work in firmware, but works fine once Fedora is running.

Next steps and improvements

The two biggest issues remaining for the Pinebook Pro is enabling PCIe support (supported from June 2021) and the lack of the brcmfmac firmware, both WiFi and bluetooth, being upstream. For the later issue if there’s anyone from Synaptics that can assist in resolving that problem please reach out to me! A interim WiFi firmware to use is here.

Some things at the Fedora level I’ve not really tested and will do so more, and likely polish with OS updates, in the coming weeks include sound, USB-C port (charging and display output). On the firmware level there’s still some more improvements to be done, tweaks to improve the USB support, turning on the power LED as early as possible to give an indicator, improvements to the EFI framebuffer to ensure consistent early boot output, support for UEFI BGRT to enable smooth boot etc.

For support please email the Fedora Arm mailing list or reach out on IRC via #fedora-arm on Libera.Chat.

Installing Fedora on the NVIDIA Jetson nano

Updated – Nov 2025
You now used the latest R32.7.6 release and it now works with the latest Python releases. Some minor edits below.

Overview
Nvidia launched the Jetson Nano Developer Kit in March 2019, since there there’s been a few minor refreshes including a just announced cheaper 2Gb model. I received the original 4Gb rev A device shortly after they were launched.

Over the last year or so as part of my role at Red Hat I started working with some of the NVidia Tegra team to improve support for the Jetson devices. This work has been wide ranging and though it’s taken awhile, with Fedora 33 we’re starting to see the fruits of that collaboration. The first is improved support for the Jetson Nano. The official L4T (Linux 4 Tegra) Jetson Nano images look a lot like an Android phone with numerous partitions across the mSD card. This makes it harder to support a generic Linux distribution like Fedora as there are assumptions by distributions of control they can have over the storage, so while it was certainly possible to get Fedora to run on these devices it generally wasn’t for the faint of heart. As of the recent L4T releases, you definitely want at least R32.4.4, it’s now a supported option to flash all the firmware to the onboard SPI flash enabling the use of the entire mSD card for the OS of your choice, which as we all know will be Fedora 😉 but the instructions here should be adaptable to work for any distribution.

Before we begin
We do it in two stages, first is to flash the new firmware to the SPI over the micro USB port, second we’ll prepare the Fedora OS for the mSD card. For the first stage you’ll need the latest L4T Release R32.7.6 and the Fedora U-Boot builds installed locally.

Before we get started you’ll need the following:

  • A USB-A to micro USB cable for flashing
  • A HDMI monitor and a USB keyboard
  • A jumper, a jumper wire or something to close the connection on the FRC pins for recovery mode
  • A 3.3v USB Serial TTY (optional)
  • An appropriate 5v barrel PSU (optional)

If you wish to use a serial TTY there’s a good guide here for connecting it to the RevA nano, the RevB has two camera connectors so they’ve moved the serial console headers to near the mSD card slot. The command to see serial output is: screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

Flashing the Jetson Nano
So let’s get started with flashing the firmware. This step with the firmware on the SPI doesn’t have to be done often. First we’ll extract the L4T release and get all the bits installed that we need to flash the firmware:


sudo dnf install -y libxml2-utils lz4 usbutils xxd uboot-images-armv8 arm-image-installer
tar xvf ~/Downloads/Jetson-210_Linux_R32.7.6_aarch64.tbz2
cd Linux_for_Tegra
cp /usr/share/uboot/p3450-0000/u-boot.bin bootloader/t210ref/p3450-0000/

Next, based on instructions from the NVidia Jetson Nano Quick Start Guide, we need to put the Jetson Nano into Force Recovery Mode (FRC) to prepare for flashing the firmware:

  1. Ensure that your Jetson Nano Developer Kit is powered off. There’s no need for a mSD card ATM, we’re just writing to the SPI flash.
  2. Connect the Micro-USB OTG cable to the Micro USB port on the Nano. Don’t plug it into the host computer just yet.
  3. Enable Force Recovery mode by placing a jumper across the FRC pins of the Button Header on the carrier board.
    a. For carrier board revision A02, these are pins 3 and 4 of Button Header (J40) which is located near the camera header.
    b. For carrier board revision B01, these are pins 9 and 10 of Button Header (J50), which is located on the edge of the carrier board under the Jetson module.
  4. Only if you wish to use a separate PSU place a jumper across J48 to enable use of a DC power adapter.
  5. Connect a DC power adapter to J25. The developer kit powers on automatically and enters Force Recovery mode. Note it may be possible to do this with USB power but I’ve not tested it.
  6. Remove the jumper from the FRC pins of the Button Header.
  7. See if you can see the Jetson Nano is in recovery mode by running: 
    lsusb | grep -i nvidia

Now we can actually flash the firmware (make sure you’re still in the Linux_for_Tegra directory):
sudo ./flash.sh p3448-0000-max-spi external

You will see a lot of output as the command runs, and if you have a serial TTY you’ll see some output there but eventually you’ll be returned to the command prompt and the system will reset. If you have a HDMI monitor attached you’ll see the NVidia logo pop up, if you have a serial console you’ll see a bunch of output and eventually the output of U-Boot and the associated U-Boot prompt.

Jetson TX1 and TX2
You can basically follow the same instructions above for the older TX1/TX2 devices except for two things. For the TX1 you can use the same L4T release, for the TX2 you need to download a different L4T release.

For the U-Boot copy there’s a different U-Boot for each device which needs to be copied to a different location. For the firmware copy I treat the eMMC as if it was the SPI flash, and run the OS off a SD card, it’s not the most efficient but it keeps things more straight forward:

TX1:

cp /usr/share/uboot/p2371-2180/u-boot* bootloader/t210ref/p2371-2180/
sudo ./flash.sh jetson-tx1 mmcblk0p1

TX2:

cp /usr/share/uboot/p2771-0000-500/* bootloader/t186ref/p2771-0000/500/
sudo ./flash.sh jetson-tx2 mmcblk0p1

Getting Fedora running
Now we have the firmware flashed we can prepare Fedora for the mSD card. Download the Fedora Workstation for aarch64 raw image. You can of course also use XFCE, Minimal or Server images. Put the mSD card in reader and after unmounting any filesystem run the following command (look at the help for other options around users/ssh-keys):

sudo arm-image-installer --media=/dev/XXX --resizefs --target=none --image=~/Downloads/Fedora-Workstation-33-1.3.aarch64.raw.xz

Note you need to replace XXX with the right device, and you don’t need a target option as we’re not writing the firmware to the mSD card.

Once that completes you should be able to pop the mSD card into your Jetson Nano and reset the device and see it boot. You will see all the output if you have a serial console attached. If you’re using HDMI it may take a little while once the NVidia logo disappears for the GNOME first user setup to appear.

Also note that while a lot of things work on this device, like the nouveau driver for display, it’s not perfect yet and we’re actively working to fix and improve the support for the Jetson Nano, most of these will come via the standard Fedora update mechanism. If you have queries please engage in the usual ways via the mailing list or #fedora-arm on Libera.Chat or on arm channel on matrix.

Three ways to speed up dnf on arm devices

I have a large bunch of Arm Single Board Computers I use for testing a lot. Most of the testing ends up being pretty basic stuff like firmware, kernels, and the various bits of hardware peripherals that people use like storage, network, display and sound output, plus things like sensors and HAT support.

The problem is that these devices often aren’t the fastest in the world for various reasons so I want to be able to apply updates to the basic system as quickly as possible to find out the results. Over time I’ve worked out that these three things speed up dnf quite a bit for the sort of testing I wish to do are as follows:

  1. Disable modularity:
    sed -i 's/enabled=1/enabled=0/' /etc/yum.repos.d/fe*mod*
  2. Don’t install weak dependencies:
    echo "install_weak_deps=False" >> /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
  3. Disable dnf makecache. It never seems to be up to date when you need it anyway:
    systemctl disable dnf-makecache; systemctl mask dnf-makecache

You may need to re-do some of these each major update as they seem to want to force you to have them every time.

Raspberry Pi improvements in Fedora 29

So Fedora 29 is probably going to account for the largest single improvement to support on the Raspberry Pi support in Fedora since we added initial support in Fedora 25. It certainly wasn’t without issue, but after quite a bit of debug we’ve got the post release issues with the WiFi back to being stable!

WiFi improvements
The support for upstream NVRAM files and the ability to add those files to linux-firmware means we get WiFi support for the Raspberry Pi 3 Series of devices out of the box! No need to grab anything, it just works! Well mostly, we had some issues with WiFi being very intermittent, as well as a missed bug around aarch64 but now with the 4.19.10 kernel everything appears to be working and stable. This makes me very happy and it took longer than I had hoped but we’re there. This device specific NVRAM driver support will also help another bunch of cheap Arm and x86 based devices that ship with Broadcom/Cyprus based WiFi support moving forward.

ZRAM enabled by default
By supporting and enabling ZRAM swap by default we get a more responsive device and less wear on the MicroSD storage. Over all we’ve seen reasonable performance improvements and to no date no major issues.

GNOME performance improvements
In May 2018 the Raspberry Pi Foundation kindly hosted a GNOME Performance Hackfest in the lovely Cambridge. Over a couple of days we managed to fix a number of issues seen, review and document a number of issues and work on a number of ways of reducing the memory usage of GNOME. Of course this improvement is primarily seen constrained devices like the Raspberry Pi but ultimately less memory utilisation by GNOME even helps devices with decent amounts of RAM and CPUs too. The fixes didn’t arrive in time for Fedora 28, but a bunch have landed in Fedora 29 providing noticeable improvements, and the GNOME team is by no means done and there will be more coming in Fedora 30 and beyond! It was an excellent start and I expect there will be ongoing enhancements here into the future especially with devices like the Purism Phone which will have similar constraints.

Initial CPU frequency support
Another of the largest issues around the Raspberry Pi is complaints it was slow, part of the issue here is that there’s no upstream CPU Frequency driver which means all models of the Raspberry Pi run at a glacial, but safe, 600Mhz out of the box compared to the highest speed, which on the 3B+ is 1400Mhz. With Fedora 29 we’ve landed an experimental cpufreq driver which allows us to run the Raspberry Pi 3-Series at much closer to optimal speeds. While this is experimental it might not stay around if we find out it causes issues or ends up being a maintenance burden but to date it hasn’t yet appeared to have caused any issues.

HWmon Voltage Sensor
There’s a new driver that reports when the voltage supplied by the PSU drops below the required voltage. It can be a bit noisy in dmesg but one of the biggest support problems we have with the Raspberry Pis is people using a power supply that’s not powerful enough, this issue is more of a problem with Fedora 29 because with the support for running at faster frequencies due to the cpufreq driver it means we also draw more power and some PSUs that were previously fine now cause issues because they can’t supply enough current.

Enhanced support for config.txt
A lot of the hardware addons are supported in Raspbian are done by enabling things in the config.txt file, this in turn does things like loading DT overlays and merging them with the base DT to enable extra hardware like HAT support. We have enhanced the way Fedora works with this which enables us to be much closer to the way Raspbian handles these things. The advantage this has is that the documentation that’s written for Raspbian is then usable by Fedora in the wider Raspberry Pi ecosystem which in turn makes it easier for end users to get HW up and running due to less differences in process. There’s further enhancements to make here but every step closer is easier for everyone to enable and use their favourite HATs.

Improved bcm283x firmware support
In preparation for grub2 support we enhanced how we deal with the firmware that the Raspberry Pi uses for booting. This deals with the early startup. We never use to upgrade it by default to ensure things didn’t break, but it also meant most users also didn’t by default get the fixes and enhancements. Now we do. The config.txt is also handled directly which means if you never edit the file you now automatically get any changes we make, because rpm handles the file as a config file, if we change it you get a .rpmnew file so you won’t lose your changes.

Camera support
This wasn’t available in the Fedora 29 4.18 kernels, but with the rebase to the 4.19 kernel the support for the camera on the Raspberry Pi CSI Camera interface improved enough we could enable this in Fedora. The early 4.19 kernels don’t automatically detect and load support if the camera module is attached. There’s some patches in 4.20 in rawhide for this, and we’ll bring some of this to 4.19 soon, and we’re working with upstream to further improve the camera support. You’ll also want the latest bcm283x firmware which tweaks some of the config.txt and updates to a firmware with ISP fixes.

Another improvements
There was also a number of general Arm improvements which sped up crypto on the Raspberry Pi, improved the USB, fixed up some issues with the wired ethernet on the 3B+, power and a number of other fixes. As always there’s more coming. The 4.20 kernel rebase should also bring with it analog sound support early in the new year.

Conclusion
Overall I was pleased with the work that landed in Fedora over 2018 for the Raspberry Pi. The WiFi regression was disappointing, but now with that fixed in 4.19.10 we have WiFi support out of the box without users needing to download anything which moving forward will make things a lot more straight forward. The initial support for the camera makes it much more useful in numerous use cases and we’ll really polish up the HAT support in Fedora 30 which for me is the last remaining big ticket item for Raspberry Pi support. There’s still some annoying bits around the EDID detection in the display, but there’s work to improve that upstream, and also there’s work to land the media decode offloading upstream too which will also one of the few remaining bits.

Fedora on the UDOO Neo

Some time ago I backed the UDOO Neo Kickstarter as it looked like a nifty, well featured, IoT device. I got the full option which came with 1Gb RAM and both wired and wireless Ethernet and some add-on sensors. It was a well run kickstarter campaign and the device was well packaged with a fab box. It has both a Cortex-A9 processor to run Fedora and a Cortex-M4 embedded processor to enable you to do Arduino style functionality which should be interesting to experiment with.

For various reasons it has sat around gathering dust, it’s been a bit of a long drawn out process with me randomly poking it as time allowed.. Primarily this was because there was no decent upstream U-Boot and kernel support, and I’d not had the time to hack that up myself from various downstream git repositories, but even without Fedora support their forked Ubuntu distro in the form of UDOObuntu has an experience that is truly terrible!

Late 2016 the problem of a lack of upstream support for U-Boot and kernel changed with initial basic support landing upstream for all three (Basic, Extended and Full) models so with a few cycles over a weekend it was time to dust it off to see if I could get Fedora 26 (did I mention this has been long running?) running on it and to see what worked.

The first thing for me to do was to setup a serial console for easy debugging. The UDOO Neo documentation is generally outstanding and the pins for the UART1 TTL are documented. Two things to note here is that the headers are female rather than the usual SBC male pins so I had to bodge my usual usb to serial TTL with some male-male jumper wires and you’ll need a ground for the TTL which is undocumented on their page, I used one of the GNDs as documented on connector J7 and all was good.

So after an initial set of fixes to the U-Boot support it saw my Fedora install and started to boot! Success! Well sort of, as mentioned above the initial support is rudimentary, it started to boot the kernel and very quickly managed to corrupt and destroy the filesystem not making it much beyond switch root. That wasn’t good. In the last week or two I’ve had a little time to look again, similar issues, it was better than it was a year or so ago but it still ended up with corruption. I reached out to one of the maintainers from NXP that deals with a bunch of the i.MX platforms and I got directed to a handful of patches, a test kernel and image later and a test boot… all the way to initial-setup! SUCCESS!

The core support for the i.MX6SX SoC and the UDOO Neo is pretty reasonable, with the MMC fixes it’s been very stable, all the core bits are working as expected, included wired and wireless network, thermal, cpufreq, crypto and it looks like the display should work fine. There’s a few quirks that I need to investigate further which should provide for a fun evening or weekend hacking. There has also been recently merged support for the i.MX6SX Cortex-M4 land upstream in Zephyr upstream for the 1.13 release, so getting that running and communication using Open-AMP between Fedora and Zephyr should also be an interesting addition. I think this will be a welcome addition to Fedora 29, and not a moment too soon!!

The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ in Fedora

So I’m sure none of you are surprised to hear that I’ve been asked a bunch about support for the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ in Fedora. Well the good news is that it’ll be supported in Fedora 28. Most of the bits were there for the official Fedora 28 beta, it just needed a minor work around, but nightly images since Beta have had all the bits integrated so the upcoming Fedora 28 GA release will support the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ to the same levels as the original 3 B on both ARMv7 and aarch64. The Fedora Raspberry Pi FAQ has now been updated with all the details of both the RPi3+ and Fedora 28.

WiFi

As with the original 3 there’s files with the firmware we can’t redistribute. The details are documented in the Fedora Raspberry Pi FAQ.

You can grab the files like for the 3 although there’s now an extra one, which you don’t really need, but it gives you all the 802.11a frequencies:

$ sudo curl https://fedora.roving-it.com/brcmfmac43455-sdio.txt -o /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio.txt
$ sudo curl https://fedora.roving-it.com/brcmfmac43455-sdio.clm_blob -o /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio.clm_blob

I’ve also done a rpm of the files for both editions of the RPi3 (plus a few other brcm adapters used on ARM boards). You can either just grab the rpm or setup the repo if you want to get the latest if I update it:

$ sudo curl https://fedora.roving-it.com/wireless.repo -o /etc/yum.repos.d//wireless.repo
$ sudo dnf install brcm-firmware

Issues

Like all new things there’s often a few teething problems. Over all the support for the new RPi 3 B+ is relatively solid but like all new devices there’s some bits still bedding down, and the combination of a new device and new OS there’s been a few minor issues that have been seen in some circumstances. We pulled in the latest firmware just before GA to fix some issues but no doubt as it gets wider testing both in Fedora and in the wider Raspberry Pi community more issues may well come up.

The ones we’re aware of are:

  • The new USB hub and gigbit ethernet interface have seen a few issues in some cases. We’ve pulled in quite a few patches to help stabilise the NIC in Linux and it now mostly works in the vast majority of use cases.
  • The USB hub in u-boot, uEFI and grub on aarch64 can cause some issues. If there’s too many USB devices connected it sometimes won’t boot or will do so really slowly. The work around for the moment is to disconnect all the USB devices until Fedora has started to boot and then plug them in.

In Fedora we’ll deliver updates and fixes by the usual updates, in particular as fixes land upstream we’ll review and land them where useful into Fedora, more than likely via a kernel update. If you see a uboot-tools or a bcm283x-firmware update you’ll want to run the rpi-firmware-update command to update the firmware and then reboot for it to take effect.

Older releases

We won’t be supported the new device in the older releases. Why I hear you say? Well it’s possible but it needs update to the firmware, U-Boot and kernel to work. The Raspberry Pi foundation respun Raspbian to support it and basically it’s not straight forward. Much better to have a new shiny Fedora for a new shiny device!

Getting started with Fedora on the 96boards Dragonboard

Support for this board has been a long time coming, it was originally announced in March 2015 and shipped later that summer. Two years on we can finally add support for it to Fedora. The enablement here will also assist us with supporting the newly announced 600c and 820c boards more quickly. We’re not all the way there yet, there’s still some firmwares that needs to go upstream into linux-firmware, but the improvement is fantastic and it’s been a pleasure working with the 96boards and Qualcomm teams getting to where we are today.

At the moment we support running Fedora off either an micro SD card or a USB stick. We don’t currently support running off the eMMC and currently basically treat that as the location of the firmware. Anyway lets get started!

Updating the firmware

You’ll want to update to the latest firmwares, my board originally had an old firmware without support for PSCI and so it didn’t bring up all four cores or support reboot. OOPS! You’ll need the latest linux rescue images from the 96boards download site. As I write this the latest is the 17.09 release (version 88). Create a directory for this file before you unzip it because it’ll expand all into the current directory. While there we also need a u-boot build that’s prepared for flashing, the upstream support isn’t quite complete, we add a few patches to the Fedora build to get everything working nicely. You can grab a pre-built version here and also get LK firmware build which enables display output.

You’ll need a host with the fastboot utility, in Fedora this is found in the android-tools package, and a micro USB cable. This process is very similar to flashing a phone with a new image, not surprising given the chipset really. If you have a serial console on the board you can follow along on the console but it’s not required for this board.

To put the board into fastboot mode we hold down the volume down button, labeled as ‘(-)’ near the middle USB port and then power it on. Wait around 30 seconds to ensure it’s booted to fastboot. You can test this with the fastboot devices command. You’ll likely want to run the next commands as root, or use sudo, and be in the directory you created with the extracted firmware and u-boot build:

sudo ./flashall
sudo fastboot flash aboot emmc_appsboot.mbn
sudo fastboot flash boot u-boot.img
sudo fastboot oem select-display-panel adv7533_1080p

The flashall command runs a series of fastboot command to write out various early boot firmware to the eMMC, then we write u-boot out to the boot partition, and finally ensure that output is configured to appear on the HDMI port. Assuming you don’t get any errors from fastboot that should be all the firmware done and in place.

Fedora image and further setup

Next up is the Fedora image. I chose the Workstation image, but we also have a Minimal Image and a traditional Server image. GNOME not the fastest in the world as 1Gb of RAM isn’t really enough for GNOME-3 anymore, but it works well enough. On a USB stick or Micro-SD card (I’ve tried both). We need to write out the image, then expand the rootfs (Note: update XXX for the device you’re writing to):

xzcat Fedora-Workstation-27-1.6.aarch64.raw.xz | sudo dd status=progress bs=4M of=/dev/XXX
sudo gparted /dev/XXX (expand the last partition)
partprobe

Next up we need to adjust the kernel command line slightly, mount up the first partition and edit /EFI/fedora/grub.cfg and search for the string cma=256MB and delete it, then add in it’s place the following console=tty1 console=ttyMSM0,115200n8. Next mount the boot partition (partition 2) and create a sym link 

ln -s dtb-4.13.9-300.fc27.aarch64 dtb

. Unmount the partitions and we should be good to go on the Dragonboard.

Plug in a keyboard, mouse (and/or a usb cable for the serial console if you’re going that route) and a HDMI cable, plug in the USB stick or SD card and power it up. If you’re following along on the serial console you should see output straight away, screen might take a little longer.

Once you’ve booted you should be able to complete initial-setup (text or the one from Workstation) and login. To get the WiFI and Bluetooth working you need to install a Radio (WiFi and friends) firmware package which I’ve made into a rpm you can grab from here until it lands into linux-firmware.

What next?

The DragonBoard 410c is pretty functional. I’ve not widely tested sound, the Venus media offload components (we have all the firmware and kernel bits for this), the GPS or some of the other more advanced components but I’ll have more details about those soon. I’ll be documenting the above plus other bits on the Fedora ARM wiki so keep an eye on that or get involved and help out 😛