Ubuntu 18.04 ARM64 RPI 3 official image published

[N37]

Hello, I think this is important info for All RPI that 64-bit Ubuntu Raspberry Pi 3 Arm Server Image is Now Available from Canonical with support from ARM.

This is in Beta testing, but as for me everything works, and it solves a tone of problems with my projects.

One of the most important things is that I can now use MONGO DB with current bug free version, that was not possible with 32 bit systems.

Hope this post helps others who need 64 bit system easy to install, ready to go, and cannot use raspberry official system because lack of 64 bits support and problems with getting some 64bit only tools working .
This solves this problem.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/18.04/beta/


Preinstalled server image for Raspberry Pi 3 (64-bit ARM) computers (preinstalled SD Card image)
The Image is 457 MB, and the system works just after flashing without any black magic to configure

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/18.0 ... pi3.img.xz


All said, this means the Ubuntu Arm Server image is ready to use immediately upon writing the SD Card and booting the Pi!
Just extract the image from the archive,a nd burn it to SD card.
Than It takes some time to first boot (it makes first configuration) next boots are smooth and fast.

Thanks to the efforts of the Ubuntu Arm team in creating this new ready-made image, no advanced knowledge of the Linux build process is required, and even casual Raspberry Pi users can be up and running easily!


This image is fully intended to be a 64-bit Ubuntu Arm Server platform!


Use cases such as File or Print servers, DNS, MySQL or other database servers, web front-end caching, or other lightweight services all make sense for this platform. It can also be used for installation and testing of Aarch64 software, developing and compiling Arm64 applications, exploring containers, or even production workloads where possible! Small, distributed compute workloads, IoT services, Industrial Internet of Things, environmental monitoring, remote compute capacity in non-traditional settings, or many other uses cases are all possible.

While a desktop *can* be installed, due to the limited memory on the Raspberry Pi, only a lightweight desktop like LXDE or XFCE will truly work, with both Mate and Gnome quickly running out of memory, moving to Swap, and then slowing the system to a crawl.
Even so, desktop performance in this image is not optimized, so sticking with the intended use of this image as a Server OS makes the most sense.
This is intended to be "SERVER" system !

Have fun !

THANK YOU CANONCAL DEVS !

[jamesh]

In the interests of transparency, and for those wondering, N37 is apparently on the Ubuntu dev team.

[echmain]

Will this also work for 3B+?

[Fidelius]

Will this also work for 3B+?

Yes, it should work, although I can only test it on my normal Pi 3B (BCM2837). When I open the fat32 partition, there are amongst other files:

Code: Select all

system-boot/bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb
system-boot/bcm2710-rpi-3-b-plus.dtb
system-boot/bcm2837-rpi-3-b.dtb

Well done, Ubuntu developers. An 64-Bit ARM8 image for the SD card, ready to boot, that's what we were looking for!

As M37 says, it's indeed for 64 Bit server tasks, but not a desktop replacement for the very well working Raspbian distribution. Now these removeable SD cards come in handy.

[N37]

Yes, This is not intended to compete with rsbpian, this is platform for those, who like the idea of having supported by community image that works with 64bit tools.
There are some things like very good MongoDB, that dropped support for 32 bits, and i have had loads of problems using "old" versions, without upgrades and fixes, parse server and some other specyfic tools. That having 64bit env is a bless.

For desktop you can use it, but in my opinion it makes no sense, where You can easy get optimized well working rasbpian.
Please remember that it is beta, so there might be something to fix.

You can share your opinions and possible bugz / fixes here if there will be something i'll report that back to fixing to the dev team.
Also i'm planning to publish a few tutorials on use cases on ubuntu wiki, because i'm a part of the editors team too. Just have not much time in last days (work work work )
Fo burning image i use etcher, it works well, very good tool.

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

default login: ubuntu
default password: ubuntu
password is forced to change upon first boot /login

[feelslikeautumn]

There are multiple problems with the image https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/bioni ... ug/1805668

Please do not edit the wiki with reference to this beta image until the problems have been resolved.

[HermannSW]

Will this also work for 3B+?

No, from:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/bioni ... omments/24

For completeness I'll point out some problems with flash-kernel.... The 3B+ is not supported (bug 1764491), nor is the CM3 or new 3A+. Whenever a new revision of a board comes out it breaks.

[feelslikeautumn]

No, from:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/bioni ... omments/24

Not necessarily.

[jdonald]

Agreed with feelslikeautumn. I wonder if the comment about flash-kernel has more to do with how earlier images had problems on the 3B+.
I was able to boot this Bionic image on my Pi 3B+, connect to 5G WiFi, then install LXDE and a bunch of packages both 32-bit and 64-bit. Well done, N37 and team.

For desktop you can use it, but in my opinion it makes no sense, where You can easy get optimized well working rasbpian.

For desktop use cases, over time Raspbian gets better while it also gets worse. It's now 6 versions behind a supported version of Chromium and 12 versions behind on Firefox. New distros have the potential to fill such gaps, and this one in particular works well enough to give hope.

You can share your opinions and possible bugz / fixes here if there will be something i'll report that back to fixing to the dev team.

Along the lines of desktop usage, my opinion is that it would be nice to look into accelerated graphics. Surprisingly I was able to modprobe vc4 without error, but nothing feels GPU-accelerated (glxgears runs fast but is using two full CPU cores).

> [from bug 1805668] Finally, flash-kernel doesn't handle overlays which is a pretty big thing on the pi. For example, by default Ubuntu-core currently uses the vc4-fkms overlay.

If Ubuntu-core already uses the vc4-fkms-v3d overlay by default, does that mean there's a chance to get OpenGL working? And if the above statement about overlays is true, then that seems like one more reason to avoid flash-kernel.

[feelslikeautumn]

Flash-kernel doesn't copy the overlays folder which means there is a possibility that it may go out of sync with the dtb file in use. That's all. To use kms/fkms you need to add an entry to config.txt. The caveat to this is that raspi3-firmware (bizarrely also included on the image) will overwrite your config.txt on a kernel update so you need to actually edit some random script file too. Which is one of the reasons I don't recommend raspi3-firmware.

I've never heard of N37. Interested how they intend to communicate with the ubuntu dev team, because the ubuntu devs practically refuse to engage via launchpad bug reports or even on mailing lists.

[jdonald]

Ahh thanks. I still need to get used to to /boot/config.txt being placed at /boot/firmware/config.txt

After setting dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d I'm able to run WebGL blobs at 20 fps+ in Chromium and Minetest at the same quality as Raspbian.

[feelslikeautumn]

Sadly the ubuntu dev's have ignored everything that has been written in the linked (and other) bug reports.

If people are after an arm64 *ubuntu desktop that works and has been fully tested then the xubuntu installer I made is still (the link will die soon I think) available https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/aarch64 ... 3b/16853/1 . Lots of info about ubuntu and the pi on that thread.

[pachulo]

I'm using this image to run my nextcloud instance and everything seems to work quite all right so, I just wanted to say: thanks for this!

[dony71]

Hi all,
I'm new in this. Boot up image from sdcard, but wifi is not enabled.
Anybody can help me how to configure wifi to connect to wpa enterprise?

[dony71]

I follow this guideline but I got unknown key auth
No problem on configuring on WPA personal, failure only on WPA enterprise
https://netplan.io/examples

[code_exec]

I use this image on my Pi for a desktop setup. Here are the steps I've taken:

[*]Switch to using the Pi's internal bootloader instead of u-boot.
[*]Enable OpenGL acceleration through config.txt and allocate 128MB RAM to the GPU.
[*]Adding an entry to config.txt to force the display output to resize to a specific resolution.
[*]Setup 2GB swap to avoid running out of memory when browsing the internet, etc.
[*]Installed xubuntu-desktop for a desktop environment.

The annoying this is that on every bootup, the system will wait for network to be configured. Since I'm using wireless, it can't configure the network straight away and it times out after about two minutes which slows down the boot time. I've tried disabling the service using systemd, but it still seems to do it on every bootup.

Other than that, this image is good and can be useful for a desktop setup as well as a server setup.

[kevin.teljeur]

Hi all,
I was just looking for the link (I've previously installed Ubuntu 18 ARM64+raspi3, I have 4 of them running) and landed here. I see that now it is no longer in beta, so that link is broken, and should now be:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/18.04/release/

Out of beta. Good timing - it works perfectly on my Raspi 3B+ boards, but not on my Raspi 3B. I notice that whichever I first run the card on, that's it, the image is locked to that board version. Interesting to see if that's still the case.

Does anyone know if existing installations will be updated to the release version, or will I need to reinstall?

[dony71]

anybody try to enable on-board analog audio?
i add dtparam=audio=on in config.txt
analog audio shown after reboot, however system frozen with aplay -l
also cannot access bcm2835 audio from alsamixer

follow up:
found the problem due to dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d on config.txt
vc4-kms-v3d module causing no /dev/dsp (audio)

[RussianNeuroMancer]

To use kms/fkms you need to add an entry to config.txt. The caveat to this is that raspi3-firmware (bizarrely also included on the image) will overwrite your config.txt on a kernel update so you need to actually edit some random script file too. Which is one of the reasons I don't recommend raspi3-firmware.

At least on Ubuntu Server 19.04 I get cmdline.txt and config.txt overwrite on every kernel upgrade (or, to be more specific, on update-initramfs step) even with default linux-firmware-raspi2 package instead of raspi3-firmware. How to preserve cmdline.txt and config.txt content between kernel upgrades or which script I should edit to get necessary variable into cmdline.txt and config.txt on every kernel upgrade?

[mikeberrymike]

Hi, I have a Raspberry 3B+ and I'm trying to get ubuntu-18.04.3-preinstalled-server-arm64+raspi3.img running on that board. I'm struggeling with wifi, it doesn't work. Is there any documentation / guide which describes what to do?
In the end, I'm looking for a 64bit os on the Raspi (because of mongodb).
Thanks in advance for any hint.
Michael

[fruitoftheloom]

Hi, I have a Raspberry 3B+ and I'm trying to get ubuntu-18.04.3-preinstalled-server-arm64+raspi3.img running on that board. I'm struggeling with wifi, it doesn't work. Is there any documentation / guide which describes what to do?
In the end, I'm looking for a 64bit os on the Raspi (because of mongodb).
Thanks in advance for any hint.
Michael

It states Raspberry Pi 2/3, no mention of 3B+

https://ubuntu.com/download/iot/raspberry-pi-2-3

Maybe ?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... p?t=215724

[mikeberrymike]

I've successfully installed 20190206-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img
But that's all.
I'll explain.
Strange things happened after installation. I've had big trouble using Wifi. I've configured Wifi correctly, but it wouldn't connect or sometimes it would connect, but the connection is not stable. And then, when I plug in a keyboard dongle for a wireless Logitech keyboard, then the Wifi all the sudden startet to work. But booting up, even that doesn't work. I haven't seen any undervoltage error messages that would point to these problems. I als noticed that there were many lags here and there without any load visible otherwise. The Raspi 3b+ is a brand new one with an original Raspberry Pi 2.5A power supply.

My guess is that this 64bit os is far from being stable on that platform. I've abandoned my plans of using mongodb on Raspi and I'm using another server in my network now (unless you have more ideas).

I've also tried pi64-lite, but that totally failed, it doesn't boot past the rainbow colored screen, sometimes with a yellow lightning symbol, sometimes without.