Booting Fedora Server from USB on Raspberry Pi 4

I’ve recently got a new Raspberry Pi 4 (the 8GB model). Of course, I wanted to run Fedora on it. First decision is which image I should use: Fedora provides both 32-bit armhfp and 64-bit aarch64 images. As I wanted to use the full power of the board, I naturally went for the aarch64 image. I followed the official guide and was able to quickly boot my Pi from an SD card (Samsung Evo Plus 32GB).

I have no interest in a desktop environment so I used the Fedora Server image. I did some quick experiments in terminal (e.g. building a custom Fedora image with osbuild-composer) but I was quickly disappointed with the performance. The Pi has 4 cores, 8 GB of RAM but an image build still takes half an hour.

Building an operating system is an IO-heavy task so I suspected that even though I have one of the fastest SD cards, it’s still the limiting factor. Therefore, I decided to try booting Fedora from a USB drive.

Preparing the Pi #

I found one spare 256 GB NVMe M.2 SSD at home and bought a USB 3 to NVME adapter (AXAGON EEM2-UG2). Then, I discovered this wonderful guide on Tom’s Hardware describing how to enable USB boot with Raspberry Pi OS.

The first issue with the guide came soon: Fedora doesn’t ship the rpi-eeprom-update and raspi-config tools. Well, the solution was pretty simple - I just put the official Raspberry Pi OS on the SD card, booted up from it and followed the steps from the guide.

I copied the contents of the SD card to the NVMe drive and voila - my Raspberry Pi was able to boot Raspberry Pi OS from USB.

First attempt to boot Fedora from USB #

My next step was to once more write a Fedora Server image but this time to the NVMe drive. When the copy operation was done, I plugged the drive into my Pi, connect the power cord and… nothing happened. I decided to continue this project with a rage quit.

Here comes the UEFI firmware #

After several weeks, I decided to give my Raspberry & Fedora setup another look. I found this amazing guide that describes exactly what I need.

The guide does one part very differently from what I did in the previous attempt: Instead of using the official firmware and u-boot bootloader (I might be wrong with these terms, sorry!), it uses an unofficial UEFI-compatible firmware. This is awesome because the Fedora’s aarch64 image natively supports UEFI boot.

Please note that the UEFI firmware doesn’t support all Raspberry’s features and it’s very experimental. For example, it doesn’t support Wi-Fi nor GPIO pins. As I would like to use my Raspberry as a headless server, this is fine for me.

One part of the guide sounded unnecessarily complex to me though. The guide uses two drives - one drive is written with the UEFI firmware and the other one is loaded with the Fedora installer. At this point, I asked myself: Isn’t it possible to just use the Fedora Server image with the addition of the UEFI firmware to the EFI partition? I naturally tried it!

Second (and successful) attempt to boot Fedora from USB #

Firstly, I copied the Fedora Server aarch64 image onto the SD card (it’s connected as /dev/sdb on my laptop):

dd bs=4M if=./Fedora-Server-33-1.3.aarch64.raw of=/dev/sdb

Then, I mounted the first (EFI) partition:

mkdir /mnt/rpi
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/rpi

I downloaded the newest UEFI firmware and unzipped it into the EFI partition:

cd /mnt/rpi
unzip ~/RPi4_UEFI_Firmware_v1.24.zip

The last step was to safely unmount the partition:

cd -
sync
umount /mnt/rpi
rmdir /mnt/rpi

Then, I plugged the USB drive into my Raspberry, turned on the power - and it BOOTED! I tried updating the kernel and the Pi was still bootable afterward. I tried once more to make a Fedora image using osbuild-composer and this time it was done in 8 minutes! That’s much less than the first attempt (30 minutes).

Note that one extra step is highly recommended: By default, the UEFI firmware limits the RAM capacity to 3 GB because older kernels aren’t able to boot with more memory. Fedora 33, fortunately, ships a new enough firmware so it’s possible to enable all the available memory. See the UEFI firmware’s README for steps on how to achieve this.

Summary #

To be able to boot Fedora Server from USB you need to do two steps:

1. Update the raspi’s configuration so it can boot from USB. You need to use Raspberry Pi OS for this step.
2. Use my guide to write Fedora Server image to the USB drive and add the UEFI bootloader to it.

A word of warning: Using the unofficial UEFI firmware may damage your device. Be careful what you do. This article is provided without warranty of any kind.