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:
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As said no way close to decent: it is just a prove of concept.
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The image boots the “raspberry” way: the kernel gets directly loaded no initramfs
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There is no swap partition or file , it uses zram-swap to provide a little bit of swap in (compressed) memory
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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.
(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…)