Long Story Short

I tried running a Fedora 42 bootc image on a Raspberry Pi 5. It’s a partial success, but I got far enough to learn a lot. The Pi 5 boots and I can log in, but the stock kernel can’t see the Ethernet chip, the Wi-Fi chip, or most other drivers. Only the USB ports work.

How I Installed Fedora 42 bootc into RPi5?

1. Built an ARM64 disk.raw image with bootc-image-builder from Raspberry Pi 5 itself. (I know QEMU exists, but I couldn’t get it working due to my lack of knowledge with QEMU) *shrugs
2. Flashed it on an SD Card with dd.
3. Added the community EDK2 UEFI firmware (rpi5-uefi to the EFI partition, next to the existing EFI/ folder.
4. Booted the Pi5 and reached a Fedora 42 Login. (partially successful).

Full guide here.

What worked and what didn’t?

Idle RAM usage was a nice surprise. htop showed about 184 MB used out of 8 GB. That’s a minimal image with no desktop, so it’s not a fair comparision with a normal install.

Blockers I Hit

• Firmware copied to the wrong place. The first copy went into an unmounted folder on the PC, instead of the SD Card. Found a tool named findmnt and I used it to rectify the issue.
• No way to login. The first image had an SSH key but no password. I rebuilt it with a password(+SSH key).
• No Ethernet, ip a showed only the loopback interface.
• Tried Device Tree Mode, but the boot stopped in the initramfs, waiting for the root disk. It couldn’t see the SD card. (Suggested by Claude). I don’t even know what is “Device Tree Mode” to begin with, so I gave up.

Why the hardware isn’t detected?

At first, I thought it was a missing package issue. It isn’t and all the required packages were installed by default from the base image. Simple enough, the reason is a driver can only attach to hardware the kernel knows/sees, and in UEFI mode nothing describes Pi5’s hardware to the kernel. Pi5’s Ethernet also sits on a separate chip called RP1, which needs proper Pi 5 kernel and device tree support. The stock Fedora kernel doesn’t have that.

What it needs to work? (from my observation)

• A Raspberry Pi 5 kernel.
• Possibly a U-boot instead of EDK2. As Fedora boots through U-boot with a Device Tree, we’d be able to copy those files to the EFI partition easily. (I haven’t checked how well U-boot supports the Pi 5 on Fedora)
• A newer base bootc image. Probably Fedora 44 which seemed to make ethernet work. (but I haven’t tested it)
• I should have tried USB to Ethernet adapter to connect to the network, but even the USB tethering was bugging out so I’m not sure that’s actually a solution here.

Why the Raspberry Pi 5 doesn’t use GRUB or UEFI

These are my general knowledge and some I just discovered after experimenting with RPi5.

A normal x86 PC starts with UEFI and then GRUB. The Pi 5 doesn’t. It starts from its own bootloader, which is stored on a small EEPROM chip on the board.

• The Pi’s VideoCore GPU starts first, sets up the RAM, then starts the CPU.
• By default the bootloader tries the SD card, then NVMe, then USB. That’s a fallback order, not a boot menu.
• It can load a Linux kernel straight from a FAT32 boot partition, so GRUB isn’t really needed.
• UEFI was never part of this design, so Fedora’s UEFI-based boot chain has nothing to start from.

The Pi 4 has a third-party UEFI firmware that fills this gap pftf/RPi4. I used the Pi 5 version of it, worproject/rpi5-uefi

This is a progress report on my Fedora experiments, not a final guide/documentation, so don’t take everything here as the final fact. I’ll follow up with the next experiments and my progression. Stay tuned! ;)