[Arm-dev] AArch64 Pi4 and CentOS 8

Tue May 12 18:39:06 UTC 2020
Pablo Sebastián Greco <pablo at fliagreco.com.ar>

On 12/5/20 00:43, Brent Kolasinski wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've been looking into things I can do to help with getting CentOS 8 
> AArch64 to run on the Pi4.  It appears that the upstream kernel now 
> has the proper stuff merged in to support the NIC and eMMC controller.
Nice, we need help testing/fixing things!!
>
> So far 2 approaches are being made: The U-Boot mechanism (looks like 
> this is what Ubuntu 20.04 is doing) and the SBBR (ACPI + UEFI) way.  
> It looks like a few folks may be loading the SBBR firmware with luck 
> on the standard CentOS 8 aarch64 image.
Yes, I'm really looking forward to test this https://github.com/pftf but 
no time yet
>
> Could one potentially recompile the SRPM for kernel 5.6 from elrepo 
> and drop it in?  I found the CentOS8 pi4 aarch64 userland image here: 
> https://people.centos.org/pgreco. Has anyone tried getting the SBBR 
> firmware to load the stock aarch64 CentOS 8 image without support for 
> the eMMC / NIC, to basically bootstrap and compile the SRPM for the 
> 5.6 kernel?
I think some of the patches landed for 5.6 and some for 5.7, The images 
you pointed are using the kernel from the raspberry pi foundation 
(https://github.com/raspberrypi/), what I'm working on right now is 
building those kernels, but as a subpackage of our normal kernel-lts 
kernel, which would allow people to switch kernels back and forth, while 
still keeping the same LTS logic
>
> And finally does anyone know if CentOS will be backporting the Pi4 
> changes to 4.18, or will they be releasing a custom kernel?  Could I 
> help out with that?
Unless something starts working as a side effect of another backport, I 
don't think there's any chance of 4.18 including rpi patches. What we 
will be doing is releasing our lts kernels and hopefully backporting 
some functionality for it to work until the next lts comes around.
As soon as I have a kernel that at least boots, I'll post it somewhere 
for you to test

HTH, Pablo