Along with stability, graphics, and performance improvements

Sep 7, 2017 18:32 GMT  ·  By

Principal IoT architect at Red Hat Peter Robinson recently revealed some of the highlights that the Fedora 26 Linux operating system brought for Raspberry Pi single-board computers (SBCs).

The developer works on Raspberry Pi support for Fedora Linux in his spare time, and, for the Fedora 26 cycle, he managed to add a bunch of goodies that would most certainly please all those who want to run Fedora on their tiny Raspberry Pi SBCs. In fact, support for Raspberry Pi landed since last year's Fedora 25 release.

But the Fedora 26 release, which saw the light of day in early July this year and was powered by the Linux 4.11 kernel by default, seems to finally enable Wi-Fi support for the Raspberry Pi 3 model, better HDMI audio and video support, better Composite video support, HAT support, and SD card performance improvements.

"In the process of dealing with Wi-Fi, I worked out one of the reasons we were seeing poor performance on the SD card. We’ve had some minor improvements in F-25 but this fix over doubles the performance for me on the SD card," explained Peter Robinson in his latest blog post, where you can find all the juicy details.

Thermal support landed with Linux 4.12, Bluetooth support coming soon

When Linux kernel 4.12 was made available for the Fedora 26 branch in the repositories last month, it looks like Raspberry Pi users received thermal support, which means that if your tiny PC gets too hot, the feature will automatically slow it down so it can cool. Of course, the new kernel also brought more performance improvements.

But wait, that's not all, because the recently released Linux 4.13 kernel, which is expected to land in the Fedora 26 repos in the coming weeks, will bring finally Bluetooth support to Raspberry Pi 3 devices, along with the usual stability, graphics, and performance improvements.

If you're still running Fedora 25 on your Raspberry Pi 2 or Raspberry Pi 3 computer, you won't be able to enjoy all of the above improvements, so we recommend that you upgrade to Fedora 26 as soon as possible, or you can wait for the Fedora 27 release, which should launch officially at the end of October 2017.