I very much appreciate the work to support the various SBC devices like Raspberry Pi and
workalikes. But I'm a little lost with this proposal.
Am 05.07.2022 um 23:16 schrieb Ben Cotton
<bcotton(a)redhat.com>:
The work around Raspberry Pi 4 has been on going for a number of
years, but we've never officially supported it due to lack of
accelerated graphics and other key features. A few of us have led the
push to get the accelerated graphics work over the line upstream so it
now makes sense to enable this in Fedora and make support for the
Raspberry Pi 4 more official.
Why Raspberry Pi, and that as the only model from the large number of comparable devices?
Why not other devices, whose makers - as far as I understood the discussion - are far more
OSS friendly or e.g. explicitly name Fedora as a recommended operating system?
I know, Raspberry Pi is very popular. But this looks to me a bit like Fedora, the
proverbial uninvited guest shouting "me too" from his corner.
This work will polish the support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and include
some wider general improvements to the Raspberry Pis that we
officially support which include the RPi3 series and the Zero2W.
Again, why Raspberry Pi, and not e.g. Pine64 Rock64Pro or Radxa Rock Pi, just to name 2
capable devices?
And what is the long tern plan? Do we want to evolve a list of supported hardware? Maybe
Lenovo next for x86-64 arch?
There are some minor caveats here:
* Support for WiFi on the Raspberry Pi 400 is out of scope as it's
dependent on the engagement (in this case the lack of) the vendor,
Synaptics, of the WiFi module shipped on this device providing generic
upstream firmware.
* The Raspberry Pi CM4 is an a module designed for IoT, Edge and
Embedded use cases. We will test and support the CM4 on the official
IO board, it should work on other devices that incorporate the CM4
assuming the vendor has their support in the upstream Raspberry Pi
firmware/overlays.
* Further device support around audio and other such pieces will be
reviewed as part of the process.
I think these statements are true in the same way for a great many other boards. Of
course, we can't work on everything, but again, why Raspberry of all things?
== Benefit to Fedora ==
The Raspberry Pi 4 is a widely available, reasonably prices device. It
Apart from the fact that it has been almost twice as expensive as comparable boards for
quite some time.
has worked well in Fedora for some time in IoT and Server use cases,
and now with a fully accelerated graphics stack available it's a great
device from a price-per-performance perspective, and it has a wide
ecosystem, so fully supporting this in Fedora makes a compelling case.
Instead of focusing on one commercial manufacturer, I would like to see a - possibly short
- list of boards that we recommend for workstation alike and for server alike variants,
decided on the basis of edition's requirements. And for which we take concrete
measures to improve support in Fedora. (And I would really like to see the arm group more
visible and present in the Fedora universe).
== Scope ==
* Proposal owners:
** Ensure any patches required are accepted upstream
** Work with kernel, mesa and other maintainers to ensure everything
is as it should be
** Test
I don't understand what exactly is supposed to change. Don’t you do that already? (and
in a very good and effective way)
And when we start to support a device or device category in this prominent way, then it
also needs a lot more documentation and visibility, e.g., a dedicated section on the
Fedora docs landing page.
== How To Test ==
* Buy a Raspberry Pi 4 (if you can)
^^ really nice
--
Peter Boy
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pboy
pboy(a)fedoraproject.org
Timezone: CET (UTC+1) / CEST (UTC+2)
Fedora Server Edition Working Group member
Fedora docs team contributor
Java developer and enthusiast