[GTALUG] Fedora 34 with EFI boot on Raspberry Pi 4

[D. Joe]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 07:34:14AM -0400, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:
> At last night's Raspberry Pi meetup, Chris Tyler demonstrated Fedora 34
> (aarch64) on Raspberry Pi 4. It's supposed to be a fully supported
> distribution, although the documentation hasn't quite caught up.
> 
> It looked pretty neat, and I might be tempted to try it. I've been a Debian
> user this entire century so far, though, so there might be some friction. Audio
> over HDMI isn't supported yet, which will mean some hardware juggling for me.
> 
> The EFI boot hasn't made it to other distros on Raspberry Pi yet, so the
> installation has to be from a raw image or Fedora's arm-image-installer tool.

Ah. I hadn't paid much attention for a while now to the booting details for Pi's.

I had missed that we were moving on from Das U-boot and device trees. 

I understand these things only dimly but having slogged through tedious configure/restart/re-configure/restart cycles in the LILO days, and the explosion of complexity in grub and (U)EFI later, I have a visceral appreciation for their importance.  

The riotous complexity at such low levels across boards that are all ostensibly "ARM" has been discouraging, to be honest. I despaired of it ever, ah, firming up in a way that rewarded the hard work of people trying to make free software work on them in the same way as had been the case for x86 BIOSen back in the day. 


Looking to find out what has been happening, when, and how far along things are, I found this:

https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/18/raspberry-pi-4-uefiacpi-firmware-aims-to-make-the-board-sbbr-compliant/

Fun thing, for some values of "fun": Case-sensitivity matters particularly here since "PI" in TianoCore contexts refers to "Platform Initialization" 

https://www.tianocore.org/

rather than the shortest name for these wee ARM boards, for which "rpi" seems to be the thing

https://rpi4-uefi.dev/about/

Thanks to Chris and to Stewart for bringing it up and for bringing it to the list.

Even now, this seems server-oriented so I don't know if we might see some relief for eg mobile devices. The port of Linux to the M1 Macs has given me a ray of hope but I remember how Apple has held doors open before only later to bar them.


-- 
Joe