It's also worth noting that there is a CentOS 8 SD Card image for Raspberry Pi 4. That's what I used. It was dirt simple to "install"- simply dd the image file to an actual SD card, put it in the RasPi, and go! (Allthough in my case, I made some modifications to the filesystems before actually booting. I made the filesystems bigger and I removed journaling from them.) On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 3:51 AM Mathieu Baudier <mbaudier at argeo.org> wrote: > > Hello, > > given the recent change in direction of CentOS, what will become of the > AltArch repositories? (like CentOS 7 aarch64 and the related kernel > repositories) > > I have been experimenting (with some success) with running a regular CentOS > 8 aarch64 (ARM 64 bits) on a Raspberry PI 4 (with 4GB RAM), using the > aarch64 kernel-rpi2 provided by CentOS 7 AltArch [1]. (a few more technical > details below) > > This is a very different question than what is currently hotly discussed on > this list, with the end of the bug-for-bug clone of RHEL, as there were > never expectations that such settings would be supported. But on the other > hand, I liked to use CentOS for innovation in a given field (mostly Java > related) as its stability allowed one to go deep into one direction with > "other things being equal" (contrary to Fedora, which is always moving in > all directions). > > I guess that all these "side projects" (and SIGs, etc.) will disappear as > well, won't they? > > Cheers, > > Mathieu > > ## More details about running CentOS aarch64 on a Raspberry Pi 4 > > As for my experiments with running CentOS 8 on a Raspberry Pi 4, a bit more > details, so that these efforts are not completely lost. Two approaches were > working : > > - From a plain CentOS 7 AltArch aarch64 installation, perform a CentOS 8 > aarch64 install in a chroot (with the --installroot option) + a clean > kernel-pi2 install from the CentOS 7 kernel-pi2 repository. Then copy the > chroot to an .img file, and use this image to initialise an SD card. > > - From a plain CentOS 7 AltArch aarch64 installation, perform an in-place > upgrade to CentOS 8 (first install dnf from EPEL, then switch the repos, > and it works) > > The second approach had better device support on the Raspberry Pi 4 (most > importantly the wifi, which was not working with the first approach), but > this was probably a matter of subtle kernel / modprobe configs that were > beyond my skills. I thought that I would share all this at some point, and > ask for help from the CentOS AltArch developers; but I guess it is > irrelevant right now. > > Both approaches were working equally well on the Raspberry Pi 3 (but Fedora > support is good for this version, while Raspberry Pi 4 is not supported, so > I tend to use Fedora aarch64 on them). > > As for what is actually the point of doing all this, this is not for > weekend hobby tinkering, and it is relevant for server-side applications. > ARM 64 bits is becoming an important platform (hence the fact that RHEL is > now supporting it, MacOS will soon completely move to it, etc.) especially > if one is interested in climate-friendly low-power IT, also on the > server-side. But finding hardware is not easy and the (cheap) Raspberry Pi > have 64-bit capable processors, even though the default distrib (Raspbian, > based on Debian) does not yet support 64 bits (but they are working on it > [2]). After trying many distributions, a paradox was that CentOS was > actually the easiest to deploy and use in order to get some results (thanks > to the work of the AltArch team!) > > In my case, the main interest was to test on ARM 64 bits GraalVM, the next > generation Java platform, which can compile Java (and other programming > languages) to native code. These builds require a lot of memory, but with > an extremely slimmed down CentOS 8 and the 4 GB memory of the Raspberry Pi > 4, it worked! [3] > > On a different layer, I could also test Eclipse SWT (Java user interface > library) on this architecture (but on the plain CentOS 7 aarch64 with > GNOME), and provide some quick feedback to Eclipse developers on their > recent support for the whole Eclipse IDE on ARM 64 bits. [4] > > [1] http://mirror.centos.org/altarch/7/kernel/aarch64/kernel-rpi2 > [2] https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/ > [3] https://twitter.com/mbaudier/status/1274263320254722050 > [4] https://twitter.com/mbaudier/status/1291421892381937670 > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos