Fedora Server on Single Board Computers - Raspberry Pi & Co.

These are just a few criteria that certainly need to be expanded.

Almost all board makers are very enthusiastic about using the open source Linux system to make their hardware usable at all and attractive to a wider audience, saving them the development of their own operating system or the licensing costs for a commercial system. They focus on the development of device drivers for their hardware, instead. In fact, to even boot, many of them require device specific software.

Unfortunately, manufacturers are sometimes much less enthusiastic to make these drivers freely available under an open source license and to integrate them into the mainline kernel. Their models are working with Linux, but only in a proprietary tainted version, propriarily customized by the manufacturer.

Fedora is dedicated and uncompromisingly Free Software, for good reason. All software involved must be open source and freely available. Fedora uncompromisingly insists on the reproducibility of all software components on their own hardware and under their complete control - especially for security and anti-fraud reasons.

Therefore, Fedora cannot and will not support boards that rely on proprietary software.

Fedora compatible are only those SBCs for whose components either the manufacturer contributes open source drivers or alternate community developed drivers are available.

Arm SIG provides a list of devices that are operable with Fedora.

Supported by Fedora is not a true/false alternative but a matter of degree and intended purpose. A specific SBC model may be able to boot with Fedora and pure free software, but e.g. graphics acceleration or WiFi does not work. As a graphical device, this is not usable, but Fedora Server wouldn’t bother because it is not used anyway. If PCIe and an m.2 interface are then available, the model would be more suitable for Fedora Server than a fully compatible device including accelerated graphics, but without a PCIe-attached m.2 interface.

Thus, the question of appropriateness depends much on several criteria and intentions of use.

Fedora distributes a generic Fedora Server Edition image, preconfigured for Raspberry Pi. Additionally, it provides a utility to transfer the image to the prospective boot medium, usually an SD card. To support multiplemodels, the transfer program is able to (re-)configure the disk image for an alternative SBC model. Optionally, it can also make some adjustments to the initial configuration.

The choice of an SBC model therefore requires careful consideration if you do not want to end up in a dead end. Fedora IoT Edition provides a concise list of references. A detailed reference list is also in preparation for Fedora Server.