My home automation setup will make use of Arduinos and also embedded Linux devices. I’m currently looking into a few boards to see if any meet my criteria. Previously I looked at the Orange Pi One, now I’m looking at the Raspberry Pi 2 (which is compatible with the 3).
The most important factor for me is that the device must be supported in upstream Linux (preferably stable, but mainline will do) and U-Boot. I do not wish to use any old, crappy, vulnerable vendor trees!
The Raspberry Pi needs little introduction. It’s a small ARM device, created for education, that’s taken the world by storm and is used in lots of projects.
The Raspberry Pi actually has native support for booting a kernel, you don’t have to use U-Boot. However, one of the neat things about U-Boot is that it can provide netboot capabilities, so that you can boot your device from images across the network (we’re just going to use it to boot a kernel and initramfs, however).
One of the other interesting things about the Raspberry Pi is that there are lots of ways to tweak the device using a config.txt file.
The Raspberry Pi 3 has a 64bit CPU, however it is probably best run in 32bit mode (as a Raspberry Pi 2) as 64bit userland is not particularly advanced in ARM world, yet.
Fedora 25 will finally support Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 (although not all peripherals will be supported right away).
Continue reading Building and Booting Upstream Linux and U-Boot for Raspberry Pi 2/3 ARM Boards
