Raspberry Pi

If you’ve ever tried to run gVisor on a Raspberry Pi 5 and hit a cryptic failure, you’re not alone. The root cause turns out to be a single kernel configuration option, one that most people have never heard of. Let’s dig into what it is, why it matters, and how to fix it.

Earlier this month we visited FOSDEM, an absolutely open and free event for developers, open-source vendors and enthusiasts to meet, share their ideas and news, and discuss the latest in open source. Talks at FOSDEM are usually organized within several sections: Keynotes, Main tracks, Developer rooms and Lightning talks.

Since we got our hands on the new Raspberry Pi 4, we started exploring how various virtualization technologies behave on the board. First thing we tried is how to run Nabla on it and how it compares to native KVM.

Given the traction our previous post got, we thought we should jot down the steps to build a 64-bit bootable image for a RPi4. The distro we’re most familiar with is Debian, so we’ll go with a debian-like distro like Ubuntu. If you don’t feel like playing with kernel compilation and FS images, just grab the binary and dd it to an SD card!