Yes you mentioned that before. Most of it is upstreamed you think. But do the distros that are non-RPiOS64 have it all included in their default kernel. I don't know. A quick check on my Pi3B running Debian Testing:All of that stuff is now ARM side driven, so open source and most of it is upstreamed I think. There is very little left in the firmware nowadays, just clock and temperature control on the Pi 5.The OS you run, Fedora Rawhide or Opensuse Tumbleweed or 'pacman Linux' or Debian Testing (rolling releases) should include almost all drivers you also find in the downstream kernel, but not things that are latest or under NDA w.r.t. VC4/VPU. So no video transcoding, (lib)camera. That is what I remember from 3 years years ago (v1.33 I used at that time). It ran with full X11 desktop (KDE, Xfce), but things you buy/want a Pi for don't work as said, so also no GPIO pins.
Code:
/usr/lib/linux-image-6.12.32-arm64# ls -l broadcom/*.dtb*-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39650 Jun 7 14:21 broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39570 Jun 7 14:21 broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-400.dtb-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39592 Jun 7 14:21 broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-cm4-io.dtb-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6820 Jun 7 14:21 broadcom/bcm2712-rpi-5-b.dtb-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21319 Jun 7 14:21 broadcom/bcm2837-rpi-3-a-plus.dtb-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22049 Jun 7 14:21 broadcom/bcm2837-rpi-3-b-plus.dtb-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21585 Jun 7 14:21 broadcom/bcm2837-rpi-3-b.dtb-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20724 Jun 7 14:21 broadcom/bcm2837-rpi-cm3-io3.dtb-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21150 Jun 7 14:21 broadcom/bcm2837-rpi-zero-2-w.dtbAnd then that default kernel also must boot on top of UEFI. For Pi4 It worked good enough and likely still does, for Pi5 I see in the WoR project that RP1 Ethernet is still not supported. At least for me that is simply a showstopper. Compared to other ARM computers I have, they can even boot from SATA HDD, 1GbE and 2.5GbE network and no SD-card needed as own/UEFI firmware can be flashed in SPI-flash or eMMC. Very easy with just 'dd' if you wish. Works with standard serial console (well-known GPIO pins) as well. So even better IMO than what you have on a typical x86 PC (needs HDMI or so).
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Tue Jun 24, 2025 12:21 pm