Earlier, the Raspberry Pi 5 lacked AlmaLinux compatibility, now, with AlmaLinux 9.4 and 8.10 support, users can fully utilize its capabilities.
Earlier the Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled the Raspberry Pi 5, a significant upgrade in the realm of single-board computers. This iteration boasts a Broadcom BCM2717 2.4 GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A76 CPU, featuring 512KB per core L2 caches and a 2MB shared L3 cache. Accompanied by a VideoCore VII GPU supporting OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2, the Raspberry Pi 5 stands out for its impressive computational power. Until recently, the Raspberry Pi 5 lacked compatibility with AlmaLinux. This gap has now been bridged, with AlmaLinux 9.4 and 8.10 available for installation on this device.
The newly released Raspberry Pi 5 AlmaLinux image includes the GNOME desktop and is built on the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel. To obtain this official image, users can visit the AlmaLinux download page, navigate to the ARM tab, and scroll to the Raspberry Pi section to find the images for the 9.4 and 8.10 releases.
This development opens up new possibilities for Raspberry Pi 5 users, enabling them to leverage AlmaLinux’s robust features on a powerful and compact hardware platform. With this addition, the Raspberry Pi 5 continues to expand its versatility and appeal, solidifying its position as a formidable contender in the single-board computer market.
Koichiro Iwao, an engineer at Cybertrust Japan, spearheaded the initiative to bring AlmaLinux to the Raspberry Pi 5. “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,” Iwao explained. He elaborated on the challenges, stating, “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.”
