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Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2026 15:05:38 +0330
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Subject: Re: RPI3 not booting
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
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From: Farooq Karimi Zadeh <hapu@riseup.net>
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Thank you Simon for these pointers. I haven't got an RPi 3. But I'm 
quite a SBC lover and I've got two Libre Computer boards ;)


On 1/1/26 10:04, Simon Rupf wrote:
> Hello Sagar,
>
> I hope I've not missed someone else's reply to you.
>
>> Yes, I have used the Raspberry Pi ISO, not the general one. It is not 
>> booting.
>>>> [...]
>>>> I flashed the iso file and tried to boot older versions like 21 and 
>>>> recent 23.2 on RPI3B+.
>>>>
>>>> There is no boot screen. Does it require flashing u-boot?
>
> I can confirm to you that the 3.21 armv7 tar-archive (and image-file, 
> but I recommend to use the more flexible tar-ball) do work on the 
> Raspberry Pi 3B+. I assume the aarch64 ones and later releases do as 
> well, but just to give you a data point on what others have gotten 
> working.
>
> The image (.img.gz file) works like other ISO images and you can 
> dd-copy it straight to your SD card. But it is a very small single 
> partition and will quickly run out of disk space if you want to 
> install more than a few basic packages and simple scripts.
>
> Hence it is better to use the tar-archive method. This requires that 
> you create a FAT32 partition by yourself of the appropriate size (I'd 
> recommend at least 4 GiB). It does not need to be marked bootable, but 
> must be the first partition and at the start of that SD-card. You then 
> unpack the contents of the tar archive onto it and are ready to boot 
> it up. More details on that process in the wiki at:
> https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Manual_method
>
> Keep in mind that this gives you a disk-less install[1], so any 
> changes, like installed packages or configuration changes and manually 
> created scripts or data need to be persisted using the lbu utility[2]. 
> So make sure that FAT32-partition is large enough to hold all the 
> installed packages and any other data you want to persist.
>
> [1] https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Diskless_Mode
> [2] https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_local_backup
>
> The nice thing about this mode is that if you make any mistake or if 
> power fails you boot back up into a clean state. Also the SD-card will 
> last a lot longer as it is only used during boot and when you persist 
> changes with the lbu command.
>
> HTH Simon
>