Hello friends, my name is Ravi, and I recently took the lead of the Ubuntu Architectures team (Part of Foundations). The Architectures team is responsible for the support of Ubuntu and its ecosystem on non-x86 architectures. In particular, we’re talking about RISC-V and ARM, as well as special focus on the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. This includes making sure Ubuntu works on the latest hardware for each architecture while also providing the best support for each architecture-specific ecosystem. If you’re not familiar with our recent work on ARM, check out:
Snapdragon X EliteHave a look also at our RISC-V blogposts. But the focus of today’s post is Raspberry Pi.
What Foundations is doing for Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pis are single-board computers, known for affordability and low power consumption. They are popular for a myriad of use cases, such as education, home automation, robotics, and industrial automation, to name a few. Raspberry Pi OS is the standard operating system for these devices.
In this article, I’ll introduce what the Foundations team has been doing on Raspberry Pis, our goals, and a bit about our future engineering roadmap.
Keeping up with Raspberry Pi OS
Our primary goal has been to keep up with Raspberry Pi OS. We have done a good job of that recently, releasing an Ubuntu image for the Raspberry Pi 5 on the day of its launch.
Historically, we have struggled a bit to keep up with peripherals support, but I am happy to report that all official accessories (touchscreen, camera modules, the keyboard variants 400/500) are supported on Ubuntu today.
Our goal is not to compete with Pi OS but to provide a complementary, modern experience, as well as a choice of an operating system, thus enabling both Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu to improve in the long run. We work in close collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Ltd.
Ubuntu Images
Our support for Raspberry Pi goes as far back as 2B. You can run Ubuntu Server on Raspberry Pi 2B v1.2 and later models.
Architectures team has been the driver to bring Ubuntu Desktop to Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 can run Ubuntu with the GNOME desktop reasonably well. The Ubuntu Desktop team has an ambitious roadmap and supporting GNOME takes priority. This leaves little room to support other desktop environments, especially if we want to support all the stable releases. We would like the minimum required specifications to be much lower.
This is something Ubuntu flavors can help with, particularly Lubuntu and Xubuntu. Edubuntu is a natural fit and does have Raspberry Pi images (thank you!). Please reach out to me or the Edubuntu team if you need help with building images.
You can see all combinations of devices and Ubuntu support here: Canonical Ubuntu Boards.
Upgrades and reliability
To upgrade the Ubuntu operating system to the next major version, use do-release-upgrade or the Software Properties UI. We commit a significant amount of time to testing Raspberry Pis for every release. This usually happens every 3 months or so, either for a stable point release or an intermediate release. We do have community participation by contributing test cases and results. However, the time commitment keeps increasing with the combination of devices (models, accessories, features) and Ubuntu flavors.
We are exploring automated ways to test Raspberry Pi upgrades and install media. This is in a very early stage, but I’ll share more once we have a prototype working.
Ubuntu Pro
Commercial plug: Raspberry Pi is committed to selling their boards for at least 10 years. You can buy an updated version of the Pi 3 Model B today at roughly the same price as on launch day. This aligns very well with 10 years of security and maintenance updates with Ubuntu Pro’s Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM). Ubuntu is the choice for long-term software support for Raspberry Pis. Ubuntu Pro is free for personal use for up to 5 devices.
Future plans
We are working on creating a mechanism to always have a “known good” boot state to fall back on. This is necessary in case your kernel or initrd is messed up and your Pi fails to boot. Raspberry Pis encourage tinkering, so it is natural that you will see these warning LEDs at some point.
We are investigating boot integrity. Raspberry Pis have a lot of boot artifacts, and we want to ensure the boot flow is not tampered with. Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 support this, and it needs to be adopted for Ubuntu images.
A special mention to the people who make it all happen: