F40 ISO for arm64?

I notice that there’s still no ISO media for arm64. Only an image.

I work in a VMware Fusion environment on Apple Silicon, so installing a virtual machine from ISO like I’m able to on physical or virtual Intel environments is standard operating procedure. And this has worked for F39 and earlier. Trying to install from a disk image is quite honestly a big step backward for F40. And I’m not even sure that the image will work in a virtual machine as it’s not really clear what devices it’s been tailored for (please don’t tell me it’s a Raspberry Pi image and expect me to accept that).

I know there were issues with the beta, but I would have expected them to be addressed before the F40 release?

Can F39 be upgraded in-product to F40 on arm64, or are there other issues that haven’t yet been resolved? (although that doesn’t solve the problem for anyone trying to install a new F40 installation).

2 Likes

https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/40/Workstation/aarch64/iso/

2 Likes

You can also grab the arm64 iso from the fedora torrent page

3 Likes

This should be available in website.

be a bit careful with that image - it’s not actually the intended primary live image, it’s an image built by osbuild, which is still considered experimental. it should probably work okay, but just a heads up. it may install the system in SELinux permissive mode instead of enforcing mode (which is meant to be the default), use setenforce Enforcing to flip it back to enforcing.

the aarch64 live ISOs for the compose (aside from the osbuild one) all failed to build due to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2247319 , which has been proving extremely difficult to debug, unfortunately.

the image should deploy fine in virtual machines if the VM software lets you boot from it, we test this daily - openQA: fedora-40-Workstation-raw_xz-raw.xz-aarch64-BuildFedora-40-20240414.0-install_arm_image_deployment_upload@aarch64 test results was the test of the deploying the Workstation disk image from the F40 compose, for instance.

2 Likes

@adamwill Thanks for the heads-up. I downloaded the image that @ersen pointed me to and it does boot. I wondered why Anaconda is still flagging the build as pre-release. You’ve explained it well.

It looks like the resulting VM updates from the official F40 repos. Is that true?

yes, it should behave pretty much as an official f40 install.

1 Like

Added arm64, f40 and removed beta, f39, intel

Added apple-silicon

Do images for apple silicon VMs still need the nonstandard Asahi patches, like kernel page size?

Short answer: I don’t think so.

TL;DR

I’ve been running VMs built from the aarch64 Live ISOs of Fedora Workstation since F35 on VMware Fusion and Apple Silicon Macs. Never needed any non-standard patches to get it to work.

The virtual hardware provided by VMware is a certified ARM SystemReady profile, with support for NVMe disks, EFI firmware, XHCI USB, and a SATA CD-ROM. All of which present in standard Linux kernels. The vmwgfx virtual VMware video driver for ARM is part of the Linux kernel source, as is the vmxnet3 virtual network driver (although the standard VMware VM configuration uses an e1000e emulated NIC, which of course is out of the box on Linux). The Fedora kernels appear to be compiled with an Apple Silicon compatible page size - since they boot without issue.

1 Like

Arm 64 image will be available or it won’t be available.

I have upgraded successfully from F39 WS to F40 on my M1 iMac, inside VMware Fusion.

1 Like

That’s a good question, and I think it will depend on whether they can get that build error squashed. Sounds like it’s been difficult to pin down exactly what’s happening.

I wonder if this is the reason why I could not find a Kickstart file for F39 so I could build my own Workstation Live ISO?

We probably won’t try and ‘backfill’ live images, no. The disk images are considered the primary deliverables for ARM. There is also the netinst image, if you want an ISO - you can install any package set with that. https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/40/Everything/aarch64/iso/Fedora-Everything-netinst-aarch64-40-1.14.iso

The kickstarts are, as always, at Overview - fedora-kickstarts - Pagure.io .

2 Likes

Thanks, @adamwill - I’d forgotten about the netinst image. The released F40 Server netinst works fine to install Workstation - just downloaded and tested it. The only problem I can see is that you don’t get a Live environment to play with - but for me that’s not an issue because the only reason I used the Live ISO was to install a VM.

Thanks as well for the heads-up on the kickstarts page.

I’d probably use the Everything netinst more than the Server one - the Server one gives you Server defaults like XFS filesystem, and I think Server-intended firewall config.

It’s been a while, but has there been any progress on getting Live ISOs for aarch64? I notice that F41 still doesn’t have one.

Fedora Everything netinst is working fine for F40 and F41, so the lack of the Live ISO isn’t a showstopper.

I agree

Added installation