AlmaLinux: RHEL replica runs on Raspberry Pi 5
The RHEL replica AlmaLinux now supports the Raspberry Pi 5, meaning that the distribution now also runs on the latest addition to the Raspberry Pi family.
(Image: heise online)
AlmaLinux now supports Raspberry Pi 5, as the maintainers are proud to announce. The Linux distribution based on the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) now runs on the latest and fastest Raspberry Pi board.
In a blog post on the AlmaLinux website, Koichiro Iwao reports that support for the Raspberry Pi 5 was eagerly awaited by the community. He explains there that it was by no means trivial to port the existing port for older Raspberry Pis to the new single-board computer.
Hurdle with the Raspi5: the boot process
For the porting, a deeper understanding of the boot process of the Raspberry Pi was particularly necessary. Iwao developed a customized version based on the Linux kernel from the company, which has been called Raspberry Pi Holding Plc since last week. It took considerable time and effort to successfully build a kernel in its ARM environment, eliminating build and boot problems.
Further down the line, it was necessary to understand the differences between Pi 4 and Pi 5. In the end, Iwao was able to add a working kernel for AlmaLinux on the Raspberry Pi 5 to the AlmaLinux project. Finally, an update of the Raspberry Pi firmware was necessary, whereupon AlmaLinux images with Raspberry Pi 5 support could be built using customized build scripts.
On the AlmaLinux website, the maintainers provide instructions on how to use the distribution with different Raspberry Pi boards. The images are also linked there and can be downloaded. Interested parties can use tools such as RPi Imager or balenaEtcher to transfer them to an SD card so that the Raspi can boot from them. The Raspberry Pi images from AlmaLinux are based on the Gnome desktop environment.
Since version 9.3, AlmaLinux is no longer a pure RHEL clone. Nevertheless, the distribution should remain binary-compatible now that the RHEL sources are no longer openly available. At FOSDEM 24, the project presented how the sources are now created and the ABI-compatible AlmaLinux is built from them.
(dmk)