Initial Minimal Fedora Image for Raspberry Pi 5

Project Discussion
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1

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 :smiley:

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!

Regards, Peter

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Raspberry Pi 5 Status
3

Thanks Peter, tried this out on an RPi5 4 GiB model:

# hostnamectl
     Static hostname: (unset)                                 
  Transient hostname: fedora
           Icon name: computer
          Machine ID: efa959b12ba0420a9ae0da57fd941da5
             Boot ID: d01807e915844bcf9232dd94a3f36e2c
        Product UUID: 64323065-3561-3266-6333-633530613500
    Operating System: Fedora Linux 43 (Forty Three Prerelease)
         CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:43
      OS Support End: Wed 2026-12-02
OS Support Remaining: 1y 2month 3w 2d                         
              Kernel: Linux 6.17.0-0.rc4.36.pr4.fc43.aarch64
        Architecture: arm64
     Hardware Vendor: raspberrypi
      Hardware Model: Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.0
     Hardware Serial: e02da5f2c3c50a5b
    Firmware Version: 2025.10-rc3
       Firmware Date: Wed 2025-10-01

With working USB, Ethernet, and WiFi. Very nice :slight_smile:

4

Thanks for your work. While I have personally decided to mostly move on from the RPi ecosystem, I know a lot of people have been wanting something for quick some time.

5

Great news Peter.

8

Thank you, Peter! I have two CM5s waiting for Fedora :slightly_smiling_face:

FWIW I was able to boot aarch64 Fedora-Workstation-Live ISO on RPi CM5 using rpi5-uefi project. Maybe this might be useful interim solution for rev d0 devices before proper u-boot update is ready.

9

Thank you, have been waiting on a mainline kernel build for the pi 5 for a bit. Set up a Pi5 8GB using this image as a worker node and it’s working well so far.

Only thing I’ve noticed so far is cpu fan for it runs constantly. I see a single cooling device and no thermal zones under /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/, and wondering if that might cause issues for cpu temp throttling.

1 Like
10

I would expect the fan to run constantly, ATM there’s no thermal or throttling setup (as basically stated in the overview), it’s one of the many things on my todo list, we’re not running the GPU and there’s no cpufreq as yet.

11

What does that provide over just booting, the Fedora U-Boot builds provide UEFI too, what most of the issues come down to is kernel support, I’m sure workstation will run on the images I produce but acceleration isn’t there in the upstream kernel.

12

So far I was not able to boot any Fedora image prepared using arm-image-installer on my CM5 (in CM5 IO board). I just get a black screen as soon as it starts booting from USB. Not sure if that is supposed to be working yet - if yes then I am probably missing some important step.
Using that rpi5-uefi gives me at least something to play with although RP1 is not fully supported and ethernet and emmc is missing there as well.

13

The details of this are all covered in the original announcement. The CM5 is the rev d0 SoC and we don’t support those yet, and we don’t support booting off anything other than the uSD. I am working on the d0, hoping to get that in place for the next drop.

2 Likes
14

Yes, understood, thank you for your efforts! :+1:

15

I’m a little late in noticing the original announcement, but was able to install the image to an 8G pi 5:

> sudo hostnamectl
     Static hostname: maple.love.io
           Icon name: computer
          Machine ID: f917fafcdda341b7b8182ced67e0462d
             Boot ID: 5564d68570c54a2aa3b8e7adedf9dd15
        Product UUID: 61326363-6666-3164-3034-626335303100
    Operating System: Fedora Linux 43 (Forty Three)         
         CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:43
      OS Support End: Wed 2026-12-02
OS Support Remaining: 11month 1w
              Kernel: Linux 6.17.0-0.rc4.36.pr4.fc43.aarch64
        Architecture: arm64
     Hardware Vendor: raspberrypi
      Hardware Model: Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.0
     Hardware Serial: cc2affd104bc501e
    Firmware Version: 2025.10-rc3
       Firmware Date: Wed 2025-10-01
        Firmware Age: 2month 3w 2d

It looks like a newer kernel rpm was installed (6.18.1-200.pr1) via dnf update, but am still running the 6.17.0 kernel.

Thanks for the efforts in getting this far!

Chris
16

This was a bug where we were missing a sysconfig file. I’ve since moved that file to be owned by grubby.

If you wish you can drop /etc/sysconfig/kernel yourself so updates will go OK in the future.

17

when will Silverblue be released for Raspberry series?

18

There is an official aarch64 Fedora Silverblue OSTree ISO, which I haven’t tried:

However, I tested the unofficial aarch64 Silverblue bootable container image on a Raspberry Pi 4 and it worked fine.

1 Like