I have an ongoing battle with bronchitis and pneumonia. This morning I took the Dr. prescribed meds. Some of the side-effects are drowsiness. Shortly after taking the meds, I fell asleep for several hours. When I woke up, the meeting was over.
I am glad the NFS/Ansible issue was discussed during the meetings. In a separate email on this M/L, I have added my input. I think the discussion has been quite productive. My thanks to all who have participated.
I'd like to take a swing at what I perceive as a possible mis-conception that has often been expressed on the M/L. Certainly Raspberry Pi 4 (in all of it's incantations) is/was not powerful enough to do very much useful work (from a server point of view). But I have purchased a couple of Raspberry Pi 5 machines with 8GB of memory, 1Gb Ethernet and m.2 storage. While it does not have the power of an N100 Intel server, it consumes much power, gives off much less heat and is usually much quieter.
If one is willing to spend the time and effort, I am sure one can find other SBC computers with better technical specs that can outperform the RPi 5. But market share is important. For those of a certain age, one can recall that Betamax was technically superior to VHS. But the vastly larger VHS market share won out. There certainly are circumstances where RPi 5 is not the best solution to a problem. In that case, go with the best solution (if that solution provides a measurable benefit). But market share, financial stability of the vendor, reliable long-term support, and 3rd party hardware/software addons will make Raspberry Pi 5 a choice for many in our target audience.
The most recent kernel supposedly will support most everything needed for use of the RPi 5 as a headless server. I believe the Fedora currently used an O/S loader that many of the other distributions do not use. According to emails on the Fedora ARM M/L, that is because Fedora ARM server is aimed at being compatible with enterprise level server usage.
Fedora is already 12 months or so behind Debian/Ubuntu in being able to boot up RPi 5. I realize their restrictions on non-redistributable software is more strict than Fedora's, thus their shorter time to market.
I would like to call upon the WG to be more vocal in advocating for RedHat resources assigned to providing the necessary missing bits for a completely free and redistributable RPI 5 distribution. I would hate to see Fedora fall even further behind is the consumer market. Much of the younger set of users could be enticed to support open source products on SBCs for real work and for self-educational purposes, but not unless we have product they can use.
I hope you feel better soon John. Coughs, bronchitis, and pneumonia seem to be running through families where I live too. I think your thoughts about the conclusions we came to about the NFS and LDAP and FreeIPA are in line with what came out of our Matrix meeting today.
I'm interested to hear what you find with your RPi 5's and Fedora Server. It was mentioned that you might be able to get it to boot since the blockers could be in the area of displaying a GUI display, and Fedora Server runs headless without a GUI desktop. From what I have found it seems like the Linux distros that are currently working on RPi 5's are those that are probably just bringing in the Raspberry Pi OS Kernel which has the extra drivers built into the Kernel that are not in the mainline Linux Kernels yet. I believe this is how Ubuntu often supports RPi shortly after release, as well as Dietpi. I noticed that OpenSuse doesn't seem to support RPi 5's yet either, so I think that a number of distros are waiting for everything to be in the mainline kernel before they support installing on RPi 5's. I still run RPi 1's with 512MB of RAM, but currently the only distros that work on those well seem to be Raspberry Pi OS Lite and Dietpi. I have tried Ubuntu on RPi 3's and I think I tried it on the RPi 4, but honestly it wasn't much better than using Fedora, and it really started to crawl when I tried running containers on them in Ubuntu. I know the RPi 5 is a huge improvement in hardware, so keep us up to date on how well it does with different server use cases.
Peter Boy mentioned that in the docs there are other ARM boards that have better experiences with Fedora than RPi's and are still in that price range. I might look into one of those, but I kind of agree that in order to make it into the consumer and home lab crowd having a great experience on RPi's is important because of the easy of getting them with accessories too.
Thanks for checking in on the mailing list John, get better soon.
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