When will the image for Raspberry Pi available?

Rocky Linux General
1

is there a schedule or never consider it?

2

To my knowledge, there is not a current plan for an official Raspberry Pi image, but there is an arm64 installation release candidate you can try using if you have a 64-bit Pi.

3

Upfront: the following is in no way something close to release, nor am I knowledgeable enough to drive a effort to bring Rocky Linux to a Raspberry PI, just replicated the work of Pablo (pgreco) a very nice member of the CentOS arm-sig.

The upstream 4.18.x kernel won’t boot a RPI or any other Single Board Computer, hence I rebuild a kernel in a rocky linux (mock) chroot from the CentOS sig (pgreco) Which is specially (and only) suited for the Raspberry PI 4.

Created an image using appliance-tools installed from epel-8

This kernel, some extra packages and the configs (mockcfg and the kickstart-file used to create an image) can be found In my little (Rocky Linix) development package repository

This resulted in an image which at least boots on a RPI 4:

RockyLinux-RPI4-aarch64-DEVEL1-img.raw.xz

Flash it to a SD card with your favorite tool or simply:


xzcat RockyLinux-RPI4-aarch64-DEVEL1-img.raw.xz | sudo dd of=$/path/to/sd/card bs=4M status=progress && sudo sync

Ssh-root login is enabled by default:

User : root
Password: rocky

DISCLIAMERS:

  • As said no way close to decent: it is just a prove of concept.

  • The image boots the “raspberry” way: the kernel gets directly loaded no initramfs

  • There is no swap partition or file , it uses zram-swap to provide a little bit of swap in (compressed) memory

  • Every body famialir with the raspberry pi’s knows you need some (closed source) early boot binaries (which actually run on the video-core)
    These binaries are packaged in raspberrypi-firmware ; as a consequence the source package of the kernel also contain these binaries. :hushed:
    (Note the are free redistributable just no source code available)

  • Did not install any graphical stuff and doubt accelerated video output will work (if any graphical output…)

5 Likes
4

Hey everyone, I would also suggest you checkout the Special Interest Group (SIG) for AltArch on Mattermost

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thanks for the information.

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Without having having done further development, (re)created a fresh image form 8.4 repositories:

RockyLinux-8.4-RPI4-aarch64-DEVEL1-img.raw.xz

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Thankyou @markvnl , succeeded when trying install to GUI
as a beginner learning linux, feel satisfied

image
image1375Ă—783 86.9 KB

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Hi @mikocox, welcome to the RockyLininux community

Thank you for the feedback, please keep in mind this is delivered as an community effort very much under development (ie it is not released by RockyLinux)

For kicking the triers and getting to learn (Rocky)Linux it can serve you well. :grinning:

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I signed up just to say thank you! I’ve used pretty much all distros of Linux and Unix throughout the last 20 years, but I was particularly enamoured with CentOS for the first few versions after its release. Now that Rocky is out and you have provided a Pi image that works, I have my favourite server distro running on my Pi too, as fast as Debian but with all the features and comforts I’ve come to love in RHEL/CentOS/etc. :slight_smile:

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@markvnl My raspberry pi 4b is equipped with this image, wifi and Bluetooth are not available

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My raspberry pi 4b is equipped with this image, wifi and Bluetooth are not available.help me

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Sorry for the late reply,

Meanwhile joined forces with @skip77 meaning the development will continue here and here
AFAIK, on this image wifi works.

if you insist to get wifi working on this image you may :

sudo sed -i  's/boardflags3=0x48200100/boardflags3=0x44200100/g'  /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio.raspberrypi,4-model-b.txt

and reboot

Never used Bluetooth, so cannot help you with this. :hushed:

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thanks for the awesome information.

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Hi, I completely missed this thread, sorry!

I’m hosting an image that should be good to go for graphics, wifi, ethernet, the works. It includes an unofficial Rpi-specific repository as well, which contains the special compatible kernel packages, as well as other Rpi packages of interest.

Here are some links for anyone interested in Rocky Linux on the Raspberry Pi:

Thanks so much to @markvnl and pgreco (of CentOS fame) for helping to get this off the ground! We want to have a fully supported (if unofficial) RockyRpi build for years to come!

-Skip

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I’m running Rocky Linux 8 successfully on my Raspberry Pi 3B+ using Skip Grube’s image described above (THANKS SKIP!!!) and the info on the Rocky Raspberry Pi Wiki Page. I was able to migrate all my services over from what was originally a Centos 7 x86_64. The services include Postfix, Samba, NFS, OpenVPN, Apache, PHP, Perl and others. WiFi, ethernet and USB all work without problems. Even though this isn’t an officially supported platform, system performance and stability seems to match the officially supported Fedora installation for RPi (which I am running in parallel). My RL8 installation also relies on a bunch of packages from Fedora EPEL repositories, which are working flawlessly. RL8 on RPi is relatively slow compared to what you’d get from an x86_64 platform, but after following the initial RPi image installation instructions, the functionality and experience has been indistinguishable from a full x86_64 platform installation.

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Thanks!

running rocky linux on Raspberry pi 3B, 3Bplus and 4 for months. All works great.

Wish Rocky Linux has a great future!

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I get a 404 for your linked page

https://download.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/9/isos/aarch64/Rocky-9.1-aarch64-minimal.iso is an *.iso. I need a *.img for dd.

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@AlexK they are under alternative downloads: Alternative Images | Rocky Linux scroll down a bit and you’ll find the img

1 Like