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
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.
There are several options, and users can choose any one of these:
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
Go to the bottom of the XML to find the latest images and matching checksum, append the <key> value to the URL to download.
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.
A very extensive table of Pi hardware is available in the english Wikipedia.