I have bought a Raspberry Pi 400 and would like to experiment how it integrates into SUSE ecosystem.
Project Description
Possible manipulations:
- flash a micro SD card from a Macbook to install Ubuntu, SLES and/or openSUSE
- same from an external USB-C SSD disk, compare speed
- deploy SUSE Manager locally and register Pi
- integrate into development VPN and register Pi into existing SUSE Manager instance
- set up a local PXE server and try to install via pure PXE/TFTP
- same from local SUSE Manager instance
- try to develop in ARM assembler on the Pi
- write findings or record a video
That's quite a lot and I will probably be able to do only a small part of it.
Goal for this Hackweek
Get familiar with the Raspberry Pi, our SUSE implementation and SUSE Manager integration.
Resources
Since the hardware is only available locally, it will probably be a one-man show, but feel free to join or just support!
Looking for hackers with the skills:
This project is part of:
Hack Week 20
Activity
Comments
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about 4 years ago by e_bischoff | Reply
Stealing some documentation from @nadvornik
: Raspberry Pi does not have UEFI implementation in firmware, with SLES it uses U-Boot with UEFI support. This means that it needs SD card with special image for the first boot. The boot process is following: RPi boots from SD card, loads U-Boot, kernel and initrd from SD card, then it connects to SUSE Manager and continues normally - check and eventually deploy system image image and boots it.
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about 4 years ago by mlnoga | Reply
Hi, some thoughts. Benchmarking has been done a couple of times, e.g. by Tom's Hardware.
A real problem to solve for SD-card based systems is card failure. Automated backup/restore on fresh SD card would find quite some fans. Most best practice sites just refer to full disk cloning. Maybe there's a smarter way, e.g. by using Machinery to tell apart base OS & changes?
What I find really vexing on PI4 is lack of a proper 64 bit OS. Even on a Pi 4 with 8 GB, apps can at most use 2.5 GB. Raspberry PI OS 64-bit seems stuck in perpetual beta since last summer.
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about 4 years ago by e_bischoff | Reply
@mlnoga yes, the RaspDebian that was installed by default is 32 bits. The very first thing I did was to flash an Ubuntu, and that was 64 bits immediately.
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about 4 years ago by e_bischoff | Reply
@a_faerber yes, I am planning to try from USB disk as well as from SD card.
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about 4 years ago by e_bischoff | Reply
I am updating this file as I progress: http://w3.suse.de/~ebischoff/hackweek20.pdf .
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about 4 years ago by e_bischoff | Reply
@a_faerber I managed from USB HDD, but not from USB ISO. Any tip welcome.
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about 4 years ago by joachimwerner | Reply
A few additional comments from working with Raspberry Pi 4s with 8GB and the new SLE Micro 5.0 images:
The SLE Micro RAW images can easily be copied to SD cards with dd or a tool like the Mac one you used.
The nice thing with the SLE Micro images is that you can even boot them completely headless by defining the root password and other configurations you'd like to be done automatically from combustion and/or ignition. See the (beta) documentation here: https://susedoc.github.io/doc-sle/main/html/SLE-Micro-installation/article-installation.html#sec-slem-image-deployment
The one thing that would be nice is if the ignition/combustion config could also be put directly into a directory on the SD card. Raspbian allows this to a certain extent. For example, you can just touch a file "ssh" in /boot to enable ssh.
I didn't try out booting from harddisk or USB-SSD.
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about 4 years ago by e_bischoff | Reply
Thanks for the hint Joachim, I read your draft documentation.
During my hackweek, I indeed did my tests with raw images with JeOS, and not with SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro.
I indeed also did not investigate automation of the initial configuration. My expectation was that I would see some cloud-init script in action, but if there was one, I missed it :-P . That being said, resizing the root filesystem to make it span over all the root partition seemed to be the only initial step I had to do by hand.
Reply to e_bischoff
Stealing some documentation from @nadvornik :
Raspberry Pi does not have UEFI implementation in firmware, with SLES it uses U-Boot with UEFI support. This means that it needs SD card with special image for the first boot. The boot process is following: RPi boots from SD card, loads U-Boot, kernel and initrd from SD card, then it connects to SUSE Manager and continues normally - check and eventually deploy system image image and boots it.
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