Make your RHEL RAW image work in a Raspberry Pi 4 with pify-rhel

What is pify-rhel?

This is a really simple (but useful) shell script that mounts your RHEL RAW image and copy the required files to make it work in a Raspberry Pi 4

What are those "required files"?

Raspberry Pi does not follow the ServerReady standard, and RHEL needs the UEFI support to boot. There is a group of smart people that are trying to solve this issue: The "Pi Firmware Task Force".

They developed the Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI Firmware Images which makes the magic to boot RHEL.

How do I use it?

Let's say that, for example, you created a RHEL for Edge RAW image...maybe using my rhel-edge-quickstart scripts). Once you have it locally, you just need to run this command:

./pify-rhel.sh -i <raw image name>

NOTE: You need to execute the script with enough privileges to mount the image in /dev/loop, otherwise it will fail.

It will mount your image, copy the files, and unmount it. That's it.

NOTE: "You modify the RAW image, it does not make a copy, so take this into account if you want to keep your original file"

NOTE: If you use the the Raspberry Pi imager you will need to change the file extension from .raw to .img.

Then you can use that RAW image to flash your SD card. Depending on the I/O speed of your SD card/USB, the boot process could take sometime, be patient while the screen shows a raspberry, it is actually booting...

Also bear in mind that you will get the following message the first time that you boot your system:

Enjoy your RHEL running on your Raspberry Pi 4!