Raspberry Pi 4 bugs throw wrench in the works for Fedora 41

Fedora 41 is approaching the home stretch, but is currently beset by problems around Raspberry Pi support.

Although Fedora 41 isn't due until late next month, it's nearing the beta stage and, at the moment, most of the bugs blocking the beta revolve around one problematic little computer: the humble Raspberry Pi 4.

Fedora 40 came out in April with an almost bewildering number of variants. The follow-on is expected around October 22, although there are a lot of tasks to be accomplished for this to happen.

At the moment, there are half a dozen accepted "blockers" - of which four are related to the Raspberry Pi 4. Currently, although the Pi reports that it supports being put to sleep in suspend mode, it never wakes up again, and drivers for the Pi's GPU are causing problems both for KDE and GNOME's Gtk4.

This isn't the first time this has happened. About a year ago, a couple of outstanding Pi-related bugs caused Fedora 39 to be delayed, including two boot-up related bugs, one a graphics issue and the other about booting from SD card, as Linux specialists Phoronix reported at the time.

One of this release's blockers dates back to then. The Pi has no Real-Time Clock, so when it boots, it doesn't know what time it is until it connects to the internet. Before that, the time that Linux knows about is essentially random, and if it's before the time that some Fedora packages were certified with GPG, the setup process fails.

In 2016, this vulture was at the Flock to Fedora conference in Kraków, Poland, as we reported at the time. While there, we met the engineer in charge of the Arm edition of Fedora, and he complained to us about the poor state of FOSS driver support on the Raspberry Pi. Contrary to what many Pi fans believe, the little machine isn't open source hardware, and it's a strange design, as we described when the ThreadX RTOS underpinning its firmware was open sourced last year. Although the OS is now FOSS, it doesn't automatically follow that the firmware is. It still contains drivers that are proprietary to Broadcom, which designed the SoCs used in all standalone Pi models.

The only Pi models with a totally in-house design are the tiny Raspberry Pi Pico models. The latest of these is the new Pi Pico 2, which has two faster Arm cores, supplemented by two new Hazard3 RISC-V cores.

This too has its own share of problems. Hackster.io reported one issue last month, which is erratum E9 on page 1,340 of its datasheet [PDF]. Since then, though, it's been found to be worse than initially understood.

So far, at least one downstream vendor has delayed its forthcoming RP2350-based BusPirate 5 and 6 hardware. On the Pi forums, discussions are taking place about whether a new silicon stepping will be needed. ®