End Goals
I am creating a home server on my Raspberry Pi 4 to host Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, ONLYOFFICE, and a personal website. I wanted to install Fedora IoT on it so that I wouldn’t have to worry about version upgrades or my installation breaking. I want to install it on an SSD connected to the Pi over USB. I plan on using podman to install all the different services.
The Problem
I downloaded the aarch64 Fedora 36 IoT installer image off of the official site and flashed it onto my 32GB SD card using Fedora Media Writer’s custom ISO option. I powered on the Pi with the SD card in. Here are pictures of the boot sequence.
And then, after showing a GRUB screen allowing the user to enter UEFI settings, it finally just freezes with the following on screen:
Booting ‘Fedora Linux 36.20220616.2 (IoT Edition) (ostree:0)’
EFI stub: Entering in HYP mode with MMU enabled
EFI stub: Booting Linux Kernel…
EFI stub: Using DTB from configuration table
EFI stub: Exiting boot services…
What I’ve tried
I’ve already successfully booted Raspberry Pi OS Lite flashed directly on the SD card, so I don’t think its an issue with the Pi or the SD card. Should I use dd
instead to flash the SD card? Does the Pi not support the installer ISO.
Thank you so much for your time 
I don’t think Raspberry Pi 4 uses uefi boot.
Also, the pi will not boot from USB with an sd card installed.
It may be possible to boot to a flash drive which has the ISO burned onto it then use that to select the SSD and install there. I have not installed IoT to my Pi, so do not have the iso image and do not even know if it will boot live for the install.
The Grub menu specifically showed a UEFI Firmware settings option, so I think it does use UEFI.
I was not intending the Pi to boot from USB. I flashed the SD card with the installer ISO, not a USB drive. I was then hoping to use the installer on the SD card to flash the SSD with the Fedora installation. I would then have the boot partition on the SD card and have the Fedora installation on the SSD.
Plus, I just realized that Fedora IoT expressly supports the Pi 4:
The iso when burned to the sd card in that way makes the card exactly like the iso and it cannot be altered since it is actually an iso9660 file system. There may be a way around it, but it seems it would prevent the installation the way you want it.
I would suggest that you download the image file and then use fdisk to recover the sd card to its original state with no partition table. Use the fedora-arm-image-installer to write the raw image to the sd card, making sure to tell it to expand the file system to the size of the device. Once it is installed then the content of the / file system could be relocated to the SSD and with a little manipulation you could leave the content of /boot and /boot/efi on the sd card but have the rest of the OS on the SSD as you wish.
I am not certain how that would be done as the IoT filesystem is immutable similar to kinoite or silverblue and uses ostree for management.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m going to try the following method first, but if it doesn’t work I’ll try yours.
- Flash the SD card with USB boot misc image
- Flash the SSD with the raw Fedora IoT image using
arm-image-installer
.
- Boot the Pi