r/tails•
trabnas

Tails and Raspberry Pi

Hey, I wanted to ask what kind of problems would I have to deal with if I wanted to run Tails on Raspberry Pi. As Tails is based on Debian I have read that there are some problems. Mainly:

The CPU in the Raspberry Pi 1 implements the ARMv6 ISA (with VFP2) and is thus incompatible with the Debian armhf port baseline of ARMv7+VFP3 and ARM hardware-floating-point ports for other distributions, which all have the same baseline. It is compatible with Debian armel (armv4t, soft(emulated) FP), but floating-point tasks will be slow when running the Debian armel port. (This doesn't stand for the Raspberry Pi 2)

Seems this problem doesn't come up for the Pi 2 model which I'm aiming to get.

The 3D driver for the Raspberry Pi, while Free Software, is just a shim that passes OpenGL commands directly to the non-free software running on the GPU.

Looks like I won't be having trouble with this too, mainly because I don't aim to use Tails for 3D tasks. So, the main problem seems to be:

The Raspberry Pi boots from its GPU and only non-free software is currently available for the GPU, even starting the machine requires a large (2MB) blob of non-free, unsupportable software

How much of a problem would that be when trying to run Tails?

Posted Dec 2, 2015, 11:11 PM UTC

14
Loading comments…