Fedora Project has finally expanded its presence and announced native support for Raspberry Pi after much anticipation. As a result of the new announcement, Fedora 25 beta has just been released for Raspberry Pi 2 and Pi 3.
Developers were waiting for the Raspberry Pi support in Fedora from the past several months. Peter Robinson, a member of the Fedora release engineering team, revealed that there was a delay due to some compatibility issues with the hardware of the single-board computer.
“The most asked question I have had for a number of years is around support for the Raspberry Pi. It is also something I have been working towards for a very long time on my own time,” Robinson wrote in a detailed post on Fedora Magazine.
The Fedora team has designed the operating system with an upstream userspace and kernel to support Raspberry Pi models. There are features like SELinux to enable ethical hackers with all the basic security offerings. Also, developers can leverage the hardware through built-in drivers such as USB Wi-Fi dongles and HD display panels and even access Docker, Kubernetes, Ceph or Gluster as a group of devices using a single-shared USB bus.
Though Robinson and his fellows have built the newest Fedora beta with all the necessary features, it misses some areas. For instance, the platform does not support the available Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity on Raspberry Pi 3. The 64-bit architecture of the latest Raspberry Pi is also not as fast-performing as its 32-bit counterpart.
No support for older Pis
Robinson additionally noted that the old ARMv6 Raspberry Pi models are so far unsupported. This means that you will not be able to test Fedora 25 on your Raspberry Pi Zero, Model A or version 1 of the Pi Model B.
It is worth noting that Fedora 25 beta was originally released earlier this month. In addition to its compatibility with Raspberry Pi, the platform includes Linux kernel 4.8, GNOME 3.22 and KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS.
