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minerva / Documentation / RunningOnRaspberryPi.md
@minerva minerva on 13 Jul 3 KB Initial commit
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Running Minerva on Raspberry Pi

Minerva currently boots to the desktop on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 when using a USB drive. USB mice and keyboards are supported.

On the Raspberry Pi 4, only the USB-C port is supported at this time. This means you’ll need to either:

  • Use a docking station that can both power the Pi and function as a USB hub, or
  • Provide power through another method while connecting your USB drive.

To use this USB-C port, you need to set otg_mode=1 in config.txt. The Raspberry Pi 4 firmware doesn't seem to support booting from this port, so you need to put the kernel and boot files on another USB drive or SD card (or just the entire Build/aarch64/raspberry_pi_disk_image image).

The SD host controller driver currently does not work on any of the supported Raspberry Pi models when running on real hardware.

We also lack a USB host controller driver for the Raspberry Pi 3, so it currently fails to boot and displays a "Couldn't find a suitable device to boot from" panic message.

32-bit Raspberry Pi models are not supported.

Running in QEMU

Step 1: Set Up Minerva

Please follow build instructions to download and build Minerva.

Step 2: Build and run in emulator

Use the following command to build and run the AArch64 version of the system in an emulated Pi 3:

MINERVA_RUN=raspi3b Meta/minerva.sh run aarch64

Replace raspi3b with raspi4b if you want a Pi 4.

It should build Minerva and open a QEMU window. It should reach the desktop after some time.

You can also run it under gdb with:

MINERVA_RUN=raspi3b Meta/minerva.sh gdb aarch64

Running on real hardware using a USB drive

Step 0: Build a Minerva disk image for Raspberry Pis

You can build a disk image for the Raspberry Pi 3, 4, and 5 with:

ninja -C Build/aarch64 raspberry-pi-image

Note that this command doesn't (re)build the system, so you need to run Meta/minerva.sh build aarch64 first.

The generated disk image will be written to Build/aarch64/raspberry_pi_disk_image. Write this image to the USB drive you want to use to boot Minerva using a command such as:

sudo cp Build/aarch64/raspberry_pi_disk_image /dev/sdx && sync

(Replace /dev/sdx with your USB drive device file)

Step 1: Connect your Raspberry Pi to your PC using a UART cable

Please follow one of the existing guides (for example here) and make sure UART is working on Raspberry Pi OS before proceeding. On the Pi 5 you need to use a Raspberry Pi Debug Probe and attach it to the debug UART connector.

Step 2: Plug the USB drive in the Raspberry Pi and power on

You should start seeing some messages in your UART terminal window. The default configuration is 115200-8-N-1 (115200 baud, one start bit, 8 data bits, no parity).