state_of_raspberrypi_in_fedora
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14:28:23 <bkm> #startmeeting State of Raspberry/Pi in Fedora
14:28:23 <zodbot> Meeting started Wed Aug  3 14:28:23 2016 UTC.  The chair is bkm. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
14:28:23 <zodbot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #halp #info #idea #link #topic.
14:28:23 <zodbot> The meeting name has been set to 'state_of_raspberry/pi_in_fedora'
14:29:15 <bkm> speaker: Marcin Juszkiewicz
14:31:20 <bkm> Demo booting of Fedora 24 on Raspberry Pi 3
14:31:58 <michalrud> Fedora 24 is the first release where Raspberry Pi is supported
14:32:12 <michalrud> #topic Raspberry Pi and Fedora
14:32:40 <zodbot> michalrud: Error: Can't start another meeting, one is in progress.
14:33:28 <michalrud> Supportable models: RPi 2 and RPi 3, noone else from Fedora ARM Team wanted to talk about it
14:33:50 <michalrud> for older models check https://pingus.computer/
14:35:08 <michalrud> Fedora runs mainline U-Boot and mainline kernel, if there are patches they are small
14:35:28 <michalrud> Raspberry Pi foundation took many years to push their modifications to mainline kernel
14:35:49 <michalrud> #topic Packages affected
14:36:05 <michalrud> Kernel, Uboot-tools, Bcm8235-firmware
14:36:51 <michalrud> For Fedora 24 there's only 32-bit support
14:37:58 <michalrud> Fedora U-Boot has a list of available kernels, so from users perspective it's like any other device
14:38:11 <michalrud> U-Boot can be controlled from USB Keyboard or serial console
14:38:18 <michalrud> #topic What works?
14:38:24 <michalrud> SD card works
14:38:32 <michalrud> USB works with 4.6 kernel
14:38:52 <michalrud> Video Output works, probably some other stuff work as well, but these things were enough to get started quickly
14:38:59 <michalrud> #topic Not present parts
14:39:15 <michalrud> Non-free codecs
14:39:30 <michalrud> Videocore tools are not there yet, it's up to community to get them working
14:40:01 <michalrud> now that we have F24 running there should be developers working on them, we plan to create Fedora images which are more RPi compatible
14:40:18 <michalrud> right now there are only ext4 partitions, plan is to add vfat also to get RPi compatibility
14:41:07 <michalrud> Device tree overlays for HATs are not packaged, we don't know if they would work as support in kernel is limited
14:41:36 <michalrud> WiFi firmware is bad as Broadcom didn't release firmware under licence which would allow for redistribution
14:42:04 <michalrud> Fedora is tested only on clean Fedora, so no non-free firmware additions, therefore WiFi nor Bluetooth work
14:42:47 <michalrud> when firmware files will land in mainline kernel, they will land in Fedora, but now no WiFi, no BT
14:42:54 <michalrud> Sound doesn't seem to work as well
14:43:28 <michalrud> Kernel complains about GPIO leds, but these will be probably working sooner or later
14:44:13 <michalrud> No SPI, no UEFI, no more three-letter acronyms that you'd expect from a proper ARM boards :)
14:45:14 <michalrud> Probably some HATs would work as well, as those are just connected over USB, so these should be okay
14:45:24 <michalrud> #topic Questions
14:45:35 <michalrud> Q: Have you considered other hobby boards as well?
14:45:52 <michalrud> A: No, sorry.
14:45:57 <michalrud> Q: Did anyone tried 64bit mode?
14:46:19 <michalrud> A: I think we have enabled it, but we didn't tested. It would probably require 64bit UBoot
14:46:27 <michalrud> Q: Can we switch between architectures?
14:47:35 <michalrud> A: Depends on which architecture you build for. If you look at config.txt you have kernel, kernel7 and kernel8, which says which files to use in v6, v7, v8 mode. So you may select which UBoot to boot, but I would not try combination of having 32bit and 64bit on one SD Card
14:48:48 <michalrud> Q: What would you change in RPi if you could?
14:49:12 <michalrud> A: It's like a 80 years old design, if you'd improve anything you'd have to use another chips so you'd just use other board.
14:49:19 <michalrud> Q: Which board to use then?
14:50:03 <michalrud> A: It's the most common question. For sensors etc - BeagleBone, as it has many interfaces, and it runs Fedora and several other OSes. For cheap NAS stuff, something with Allwinner.
14:51:01 <michalrud> A: There you have separate ports, not all ports behind one hub, so you may get some performance. It's not floppy speed in case of RPi, but compared to normal HDDs, it may feel like it. If you want generic machine for ARM v7, one of TK-1 based ones.
14:52:05 <michalrud> A: you need to spend a bit of time to run something else than ChromeOS, but it's worth it. For ARM developemnt and connecting something, it's Jetson TK-1, nVidia based, as nVidia's TK-1 is the best that you can get - fast CPU, fast GPU, open driver supported by vendor, running under every mainline distro.
14:52:54 <michalrud> A: If you want a v8 distro, RPi3, Odroid c2, which are lacking, but you can run 64bit on them. There are servers, powerful, but >$1000
14:53:48 <michalrud> A: There is nearly nothing in between.
14:56:27 <michalrud> Q: Does the PI have 3D graphcs?
14:56:38 <michalrud> A: No. Now it's just a basic support to get it booted with video.
14:59:34 <michalrud> For me the moment I got anything shown on the display was a success, but expectations from the community changed a lot in the recent years
15:01:47 <michalrud> RPi2 and RPi3 support virtualisation in theory, but it can't make use of it so there are errors about it during booting
15:02:17 <michalrud> the good thing is that it's quite cheap, and there's one thing that I like about this board - one - it made all other boards cheaper.
15:02:35 <michalrud> Before RPi all boards cost was over $100
15:03:20 <michalrud> BeagleBoard Black was $86, then RPi got released and TI rushed and made BB Black and price dropped to $86 to make it competitive
15:03:34 <michalrud> Q: Why did you make a talk about a board that you dont like?
15:04:42 <michalrud> A: There are insane amount of people who have this board, come to IRC and ask if they can run Fedora on their boards, especially after release. So now we have support for it, so we can show that you can run F24 on this board, because people are going to ask anyway, also there may be people at Flock that have this board and may want to know
15:05:06 <michalrud> You may come to my blog and check the RPi tag and see a lot of negative posts, but it works
15:05:41 <michalrud> I am suprised that RPi foundation didn't spend time to push support to mainline kernel. There's literally one guy at Broadcom who does everything.
15:06:12 <michalrud> I saw boards which went from 0 support to better supported than RPi in two kernel cycles.
15:06:33 <michalrud> It's the low level of vendor support to those developers who want to run fresh SW.
15:07:49 <michalrud> But I like the community behind RPi, forums have interesting discussions, sometimes even useful ones, and they gave me an opportunity to tune my HTTPS server after one of my "I don't like RPi" posts.
15:08:05 <michalrud> Q: How RPi foundation may fix the problem?
15:10:01 <michalrud> A: They need to create a new board. The updates are added new features, they added some more pins, so the update between A and B, they did compute module which was just made it in different form factor, Zero was also just a different form factor, in RPi2 they updated CPU Cores so you could run normal distributions, and RPi3 should not exist, it should be a RPi2+ as it has additional WiFi, and 64bit cores but 1GB of memory.
15:10:26 <michalrud> I don't see an extra value of such CPU on such a limited board.
15:10:39 <michalrud> Q: How would you create a board in this price point?
15:11:32 <michalrud> A: I wouldn't take this. For connecting stuff, frying it and just taking another one it's okay. On making a media player you may do it, but not under Fedora.
15:14:30 <michalrud> Q: Is there anything you'd like them to do in RPi4?
15:15:21 <michalrud> A: I don't care about RPi4. Now I am working on something else, I am getting OpenStack running on ARMv8. So, I really have limited time
15:15:37 <michalrud> A: There are less and less things to do in v7, at least in packaging level
15:18:51 <michalrud> #endmeeting
15:18:55 <bkm> #endmeeting