CentOS Alternatives on Raspberry Pi 5 - current status of porting dnf-based OS
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Gave a talk at RaspberryPint - London Raspberry Pi community on 27th May (GMT)
CentOS Alternatives on Raspberry Pi 5 - current status of porting dnf-based OS
- 1. CentOS Linux alternatives on Raspberry Pi 5 Masafumi Ohta Japanese Raspberry Pi Users Group
- 2. About.me – Masafumi Ohta • Running Raspberry Pi community in Japan • Contributing OSS projects over decade. • Helping Raspberry Pi BtoB business lately • Former Core Contributor for OpenSolaris Project • FOSDEM19/21 Speaker
- 3. CentOS alternatives running on Raspberry Pi 5 • AlmaLinux • Cybertrust Japan (a Softbank company) is contributing its porting project. • Akkie, my community member is evaluating with Iwao-san of Cybertrust Japan. • RockyLinux • I am just evaluating RockyLinux compared with AlmaLinux. • Headless images only. • Sound doesn’t work just for now different from AlmaLinux (Alma is better if you want to use UI)
- 4. Both are currently in development • Currently in development • Use the boot system from Raspberry Pi OS (by Raspberry Pi). • Different from x64 kernel version (6.x.x on RaspberryPi 5) • Using the boot system by SBC vendors is a common approach to building other operating systems on such SBCs as Raspberry Pi • Partly proprietary • build EFI/boot then build rootfs • Rocky and Alma is different way to build the system(?)
- 6. “My first step was to learn the Raspberry Pi boot process to build AlmaLinux’s kernel package based on the Raspberry Pi kernel, which is a fork of the Linux kernel. Although I had previously contributed to AlmaLinux Raspberry Pi images, I didn’t know much about the boot process. It took considerable time and effort to successfully build a kernel on my ARM environment, overcoming failed builds and boot issues along the way. These attempts allowed me to understand the Raspberry Pi boot process more deeply and identify what was going wrong.” Koichiro Iwao of Cybertrust Japan, maintainer of Almalinux on Raspberry Pi 5
- 10. Demonstration (AlmaLinux 9 on Raspbery Pi 500)
- 11. Reference links. • Latest OS image file • https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-06-11-almalinux-support-for- raspberry-pi-5/ • https://dl.rockylinux.org/stg/sig/9/altarch/aarch64/images/Rocky- 9-SBC-RaspberryPi-9.5-20250324.0.aarch64.raw.zst • Understanding the boot mechanism ARM-based SBC like Raspberry Pi https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025- 6084-booting-blobs-between-u-boot-and-linux/
- 12. Q&A