Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi is a series of small single-board computers.
These machines are well supported by Gentoo. There are two main ways of installing Gentoo on them:
- cross-compiling
- using Raspberry Pi OS, or the gentoo "Minimal Installation CD", as a system to provide a chroot.
Some older models are 32-bit only, others support 32-bit and 64-bit. Some hardware updates since 2012, 32/64-bit and different methods of installation lead to several installation instructions.
Installation Instructions
Todo:
- Merge some of these pages...
There is no Gentoo ARM(64) Handbook in general since the hardware and therefore the installation process differs much more than installation for e.g. x86 hardware.
The below guide is the recommended for both 32and 64bit Raspberry Pis :
Users looking for a certain usage case might find the follow archived guides useful for reference, however do note these are likely out of date:
32-bit
- Installation (previously on this page)
- Quick Install Guide
- Minimal musl and busybox cross building
- Cross building
64-bit
- Pi 3 64 bit install
- Pi 4 64 bit install
- In place installation (this will largely work for 32-bit too)
64-bit from GenPi64
These images are not official.
Yet another alternative for 64-bit models is to use the images from GenPi64. The group is following up on Sakaki's work. These can be dd'ed on a flashdrive. Support and discussions for these all take place on their Discord channel. There is a github repository at https://github.com/GenPi64.
There is a not-so-end-user-friendly XML that links to current images. There should be at least three versions:
- OpenRC Lite
- OpenRC Desktop
- systemd Lite
- systemd Desktop
Go to the bottom of the XML to find the latest images and matching checksum, append the <key> value to the URL to download. They have different versions and options available (.tar.zst, img.zst, ...) so you might want to take a good look before downloading anything.
Hardware
32-bit vs. 32/64-bit models
- 32-bit only: Zero PCB v1.2/v1.3/W/WH, Pi 1 A/A+/B/B+, Pi 2B (<v1.2), Compute Module 1
- 32-bit and 64-bit: Pi 2B (v1.2), Pi 3 A+/B/B+, Pi 4B, Pi 400, Compute Module 3[+][lite]/4[lite], Pi Zero 2 W
- gentoo not available: Pi Pico
There are some ARM SoCs that support 64-bit but no 32-bit. Those weren't used in the Pis.
WIFI 5ghz DFS Channels
On the raspberry pi you may have issues being able to see your WIFI 5ghz networks. You should be able to advise the chip which region your in and be able to enable the DFS channels but that does not seam to work. Its unknown if its a hardware or driver issue at this time. The workaround for this issue is to set your access point/router to not use the DFS channels and then you should be able to see your networks in the list. This only applies to the raspberry pi systems that have a wifi 5ghz capable chip, PI3 and above.
A very extensive table of Pi hardware is available in the english Wikipedia.