Community support for Raspberry Pi

The officially supported hardware platform for the Mender OTA updater client is the Beaglebone. The recipes needed to support this platform are part of the standard meta-mender layer and testing of the client on this platform is integrated into our board farm and automated build infrastructure.

Support and integration into the Raspberry Pi platform was recently contributed to the meta-mender layer by esteemed community member Mirza Krak. While not yet part of our formal testing infrastructure, the Mender client is well supported and fully functional on this platform. Based on the mailing list traffic related to this platform, it is in high demand.

Instructions for building Yocto for the Raspberry Pi platform with Mender client support are available in the Mender Raspberry Pi layer.

There are some known issues with Raspberry Pi 3 support that are being discussed in the mailing list at present and we look forward to resolving them and solidifying the support for this platform.

Community contributions of features and platform support is welcome and is one of the benefits of Mender being an open source project. While we won’t merge all community-contributed platforms into the meta-mender layer, for platforms with wider use, we will certainly consider it. Support for the Raspberry Pi platform is exciting due to the large number of Raspberry Pi devices in the market and we look forward to the additional users this hardware device will bring to Mender.

Many thanks to Mirza for the efforts!