Fedora image status

The Kickstarter page for VisionFive 2 mentions that 4 images would be available for the VisionFive 2 SBC.

  1. Debian: A Debian Sid image was made available by StarFive
  2. Fedora: absent
  3. Ubuntu: Someone from Canonical already has the board and I suppose an image will be out soon
  4. OpenSUSE: A community image of OpenSuse Tumbleweed is available

So the only thing that is missing without any updates whatsoever (right now) is the Fedora image for the VisionFive 2. Is there any status to this? Any ETA?

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No risc-v package build system instance for Fedora.

Just try openEuler

No risc-v package build system instance for Fedora

Are you sure?

Just try openEuler

I need Feodra because I have a few use cases which are best met by Fedora, out of the box.

  1. My personal preference is to use Podman over Docker. Fedora packages this best.
  2. I want to experiment with building RISC-V packages for Rocky Linux, which is easier on a RHEl-like environment, compared to openEuler.
  3. I want SELinux.

You can join this group on Matrix You're invited to talk on Matrix

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FYI: Index of /repos-dist

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https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/risc-v/repo/fedora/

There are fc29 & fc37 (33 is empty directory)in Offical site.

There’s not a bootable image because we’re waiting on stuff to get upstream. We have an IRC channel #fedora-riscv on Libera.

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There are ways to run(aka systemd-nspawn) Fedora 38 from within Debian. Essentially the sdcard still holds Debian Image-69, and the nvme holds a partition holding the contents for Fedora 38’s risc-v image originally intended for the hifive unmatched, but still works for VF2. The trick was to use the Debian Image-69’s “/boot” and only Fedora38’s “/”
it’s discussed here:

Recently, somebody actually helped me to add a new entry in my extlinux.conf to launch directly into the nvme’s fedora 38 “/”, but you still need the debian image-69 /boot. I don’t need to systemd-nspawn into Fedora 38 anymore.

It’s a bit of finagling, but it certainly helps to get closer to getting Fedora onto the VF2 for sure.

One could create an image right now that uses debian image-69’s boot and the nvme’s fedora 38 “/” to provide something, but that’s not the ideal. It’s just a workaround until everything lands in the usual place it’s supposed to land.

I’m grateful podman runs well in Debian Image-69. I would not have succeeded in doing anything to get this far without it.

Oddly enough I can’t get podman to install on the Fedora 38 nvme running on VF2 itself which was stopping me from continuing my efforts to ultimately create a fedora silverblue 38 image for the vf2. I’m new to that whole original process but there are others in discussion and have better understaning about all that. I’m trying to keep up LOL.
Fedora 38 packages for riscv is still a WIP in itself. The repos group list shows lists, but the packages without the groups haven’t been entirely built so may not be installed/empty installs. At least that was my experience when I last tried last week.

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I noticed that but didn’t look into that specific way of getting the Fedora image working because I do not have an NVMe drive at the moment.

Hence, I am asking for an image :sweat_smile:

I could look into creating an image but I don’t know how the SD Card partitions are laid out… Like, why do some start with a 2MB offset, etc.

At a guess 2MiB (0x20_0000) is where the 32KiB ZSBL (zerostage bootloader ROM) in the JH7110 checks to read the SPL (second stage loader) on an SD card / eMMC during a normal boot flow.

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I had saved the PDFs to understand them one by one but forgot to save the boot flow PDF and that’s why I was confused.

Thank you @mzs! :smile:

You can boot fedora from sdcard too. I chose nvme because… well… I had one.

The debian-69 image comes with three partitions where the third one is the root filesystem. One normally expands that to fill the whole sdcard but instead of doing that you can create a fourth partition mmcblk1p4 that would hold the fedora root fs. Just sub that partition for the nvme partition in the other thread and you should be ok.

I just skipped through it because an NVMe drive was mentioned and I don’t have one at the moment. Now, taking a closer look at it, I realize what was done.

But my primary concern is that with a Fedora image, SELinux, among other Kernel configuration, is a given. Though I don’t directly interact with SELinux, most of the networking and Podman stuff that I do does need SELinux in some way or other.

It’s not Fedora that I need, but the things that come with Fedora out of the box that makes me want it, if you know what I mean :wink:

Guess I will have to wait sometime until Linux 6.4 to get a Fedora image from the upstream devs :sweat_smile:

Debian69’s kernel is not enabled “security label” .
This will cause some rpm install fail.

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