Raspberry Pi 5 images for Fedora 44

Ahh, sure! :slight_smile: I didn’t expect this to be a short cut.

Let me know if there’s anything I can help the team with. In the meantime, I will continue playing with my RPi5 devices and will test them on F44 from stability standpoint.

Hi @pbrobinson ,

I’ve been testing your Fedora 44 KDE spin. Unfortunately, I’m running into a kernel panic when booting from the SD card, which is the same issue I encountered with my own installation.

If your Wi-Fi driver works on the SD card, you might want to try my install script. I’d suggest adding the serial package as well, so we can trace the kernel panic via the USB serial port during a basic prompt installation.

Along with that, I’d like to share my NVMe install script for others to try.

How to use it:
Take a running Fedora instance on an SD card, run the script (for example in /home), and answer the prompts. In about two minutes, the script sets up a fresh Fedora installation on your NVMe or USB drive. Conversely, if your system is already running on NVMe, you can use the script to create a clean SD card image with a simple prompt login.

Have fun testing it!
aarch64-fedora-nvme-install-v1.3.sh

With this script, you can find out where the ‘hitch’ is without any Window Managers (WMs) getting in the way, as it installs a purely prompt-based Fedora.

I encountered these same kernel panics in Fedora 43 because the correct drivers were missing. I’m seeing the same crash in your Fedora 44 KDE spin after a while. This usually stops happening once the kernel can correctly access and load the proper drivers. However, the Wi-Fi drivers first need to work reliably and be able to save their state to the SD card. Once that’s working and you have online access, the script can pull the original RPMs directly from the Fedora repositories for the installation.

Happy bug hunting and happy tinkering!

Best regards,
Blacky

Hey Peter. I’m going to throughout a disclaimer that I am a noob when it comes to computer systems and did a lot of this bug investigation with Claude.

TLDR: Bluetooth not working on Pi 5 — root cause identified (U-Boot device tree)

I’m running the latest F44 aarch64 ARM image on my Pi 5 model b. I’ve discovered that U-Boot is passing a stripped internal device tree to the kernel that omits the properties needed to activate Bluetooth. Patching the DTB files on disk has no effect.

The Bluetooth firmware files are present, the brcm,bcm43438-bthci_uart driver alias is correct, and the DTB files on disk correctly describe the hardware. But the live device tree the kernel actually receives (readable via /proc/device-tree) shows the Bluetooth node stripped down to just:

compatible = "brcm,bcm43438-bt";
phandle = <0x3e>;

Missing: max-speed, shutdown-gpios, and crucially no status = "okay". Without status set, the kernel never probes the device.

I believe the main culprit is that /boot/efi/rpi-u-boot.bin is identical to /usr/share/uboot/rpi_arm64/u-boot.bin from uboot-images-armv8-2026.04-2.fc44 . This is a generic rpi_arm64 build, not Pi 5 specific. U-Boot rebuilds the device tree internally from its own embedded DTS, so the correct DTB files on disk are never used for this purpose.

Either a Pi 5 specific U-Boot build with a corrected internal device tree that sets status = "okay" on the Bluetooth node with correct max-speed and shutdown-gpios properties, or a patch to the rpi_arm64 U-Boot target that handles Pi 5 Bluetooth correctly.

Happy to provide any additional diagnostic output. Thanks for all the work on this port!

1 Like

The pi 5 uses a Cypress CYW43455 for bluetooth and wifi.

The pi 3 used the bcm43438. so this should not have any pins or status on it.

I’m not saying it isn’t a legit bug and the information isn’t beneficial. Just that you need to look at the linux support for the Cypress chip. Peter is usually really busy and may not get back soon. You seem pretty motivated, so I am just trying to point you in a better direction to dive in. Great job so far! :slight_smile:

Sorry for jumping in late but this is the only active discussion I can find on Raspberry Pi 5 Fedora. I’m starting a new Raspberry Pi project and I want to cover the Zero 2 W, the Pi 4 and the Pi 5. I don’t necessarily need NVME or the Pi 500 but I do need USB booting on the 4 and 5; microSD cards are too slow for my application at the high end. Can I do this now with Rawhide, and if so, will it be in Fedora 45?

The limiting factor is the speed at which the linux kernel has device support for RPi 5 hardware merged. We are still waiting on important device support as of the last message I recall seeing.

I’m using Fedora 44 KDE on my RPi 4 and Fedora 43 on my Rpi 3.
But only the raspbian OS works for the RPi 5 as it has the necessary device support from out-of-tree source code.

Yeah, that’s what I figured. This is a greenfield project and may never be released beyond my home and an occasional blog post, so it might well end up being best with Pi OS or possibly Armbian or even Yocto.

That said, the project is targeting squeezing the last gigaflop of performance out of the smaller 64-bit Arm boards, not trying to do awesome stuff on a Pi 500+ that’s priced out of the market relative to an Apple Neo. :wink: