With community support you can enjoy AOSC OS in your Raspberry Pi with ease.
There are many way to boot Linux on a Raspberry Pi, e.g. UEFI, U-Boot, etc. This tutorial is meant for plain boot method.

Following this tutorial, you will bootstrap the entire OS from existing AOSC OS installation. The effort to publish ready to flash images is ongoing.

If you have any questions, please checkout our Raspberry Pi FAQ and troubleshooting page.

Supported boards§

Technically all Raspberry Pis equipped with an ARM64 CPU are compatible with mainline AOSC OS, including:

• Raspberry Pi 4th gen boards (BCM2711)
  • Raspberry Pi 4B (all variants)
  • Raspberry Pi 400
  • Compute Module 4
• Raspberry Pi 3th gen boards (BCM2837A0/B0)
  • Raspberry Pi 3/3B/3B+
  • Compute Module 3
• Some BCM2837 based Raspberry Pi 2 boards (2B Rev1.2)

In this tutorial§

You will go through these steps by following the tutorial:

1. Partition and format the target drive
2. Install AOSC OS on target drive
3. Install Raspberry Pi BSPs (board support package)
4. Generic post installation process
5. Plugin and run

Installation§

Getting started§

Please check if you have all of these things listed here:

• A supported Raspberry Pi board.
• A storage device to install OS. It can be a SD card, or a SSD/HDD in an USB enclosure.
  • A good enough SD Card reader which does not corrupt your SD card, if a SD card is used.
• A working Internet connection via Ethernet.

Dependencies§

Following packages are required to be installed:

• dosfsutils
• e2fsprogs
• arch-chroot
• fdisk

If your host machine is not arm64 based, you should set up binfmt to complete the post-installation process:

sudo apt install qemu-user-static
sudo systemctl restart systemd-binfmt.service

Plug your drive into the PC, we assume your drive is appeared as /dev/sda.
If you are uncertain about which device is, run lsblk may help you identifying it.

Partitioning the drive§

We use GPT partition table for Raspberry Pi 4, MBR for Raspberry Pi 3.

You need at least two partitions on the target drive first:

1. A FAT32 boot partition, at least 200MiB, and it must be the first partition. This partition is the boot partition of your Pi. It contains firmware, board configuration, kernel and initramfs image.
2. A root filesystem partition. You can choose a filesystem whatever you want, just if kernel and initramfs supports it. For this tutorial we will use ext4.
   • LVM is bootable only if you have supported initrd image placed in boot partition and correctly set up.

To complete the partitioning, make sure your target disk is not mounted or you will have to replug it again to get new partition table probed.

For Raspberry Pi 4 and up (GPT)§

The following script will create two partitions with GPT partition table on /dev/sda, 200MiB for boot and rest for root partition:

sudo -s
sfdisk /dev/sda << EOF
label:gpt

start=2048, size=200MiB, type=C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B,
type=0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4,
EOF

For Raspberry Pi 3 (MBR)§

The following script will create two partitions with MBR partition table on /dev/sda, 200MiB for boot and rest for root partition:

sudo -s
sfdisk /dev/sda << EOF
label:mbr

start=2048, size=200MiB, type=0x0c, bootable,
type=0x83,
EOF

You can change these scripts to satisfy your needs, e.g. add a swap partition.

Formatting the target drive§

Assuming you have partitioned the drive using the script above.
In this case the boot partition is sda1, and the root filesystem partition is sda2.

These commands will format these two partitons:

mkfs.vfat -n boot /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 -L aosc /dev/sda2

Or if you prefer setting up LVM, just create a PV on the large root partition:

mkfs.vfat -n boot /dev/sda1
pvcreate /dev/sda2
vgcreate aosc /dev/sda2
lvcreate -n root -l 100%FREE aosc
mkfs.ext4 -L aosc /dev/aosc/root

Install AOSC OS§

First, mount the root filesystem:

sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

Or if you have set up LVM:

sudo mount /dev/aosc/root /mnt

Then grab the latest AOSC OS ARM64 tarball, and then extract it to the root filesystem:

cd /mnt
tar --numeric-owner -pxvf /path/to/tarball.tar.xz

Post Installation§

Chroot into the target OS:

sudo cp /usr/bin/qemu-aarch64-static /mnt/usr/bin/
sudo arch-chroot /mnt

Notice:
From now on all commands should be run in chroot environment.

Remember to remove /usr/bin/qemu-aarch64-static from target OS after finishing setup!

Mount the boot partition inside the target OS:

mkdir /boot/rpi
mount /dev/sda1 /boot/rpi

Generate fstab:

genfstab -p -U / | sed -e '/swap/d' -e '/none/d' >> /etc/fstab

Then proceed with the general post installation process to set up your OS. Do not exit the chroot environment after finishing this process.

BSP Installation§

To get your Pi running, a set of BSPs (Board Support Packages) must be installed upon the installation.

For now no extra manual setup is needed, just install the BSPs directly.

Add BSP repository:

echo "deb https://repo.aosc.io/debs stable bsp-rpi" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/10-bsp-rpi.list
apt update

Install kernel (which brings up all necessary BSPs):

apt install linux+kernel+rpi64

Or you would prefer LTS branch:

apt install linux+kernel+rpi64+lts

Don't worry, we will take care about everything to get your Pi running, including generating config.txt and cmdline.txt.

Plugin and run!§

If all above are set, you can exit your chroot environment, unmount them, plug it in to your Pi and boot!

In the chroot, run:

umount /boot/rpi
exit

Now you are in host OS, run:

cd /
umount /mnt
sync

Then unplug it and plug in your Pi, power it on and here we go