5 ms·

Proxmox VE now available for ARM64

96 points by geerlingguy 2mo ago

vegadw 2mo ago
Corpo-only support, Q: Can I run Proxmox VE on a Raspberry Pi or a similar single-board computer? A: No. An arm64 host must boot through UEFI and describe its hardware through ACPI. Device-tree-only boards and legacy boot are not supported. Basically no consumer facing arm SBCs, NAS boxes, etc will work with this. Frankly, I see this as a good thing though: Maybe it'll make the SBC market get its stuff together and start actually doing UEFI instead of every board needing a custom build.
- geerlingguy 2mo ago
  Technically it will run on Pis — someone in my YouTube comments already has it going on top of basic Pi OS 13 (disabled NetworkManager and cloud-init to get it going). Someone else on Mastodon already has it running via a custom Pi 4 UEFI image. I'm adding more details in my blog post here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/proxmox-ve-arm-official/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/proxmox-ve-arm-offici...
- drdexebtjl 2mo ago
  Someone in the forum thread reports it runs on their Pi. I don’t see why it couldn’t work, since Debian runs fine on these SBCs. Maybe they mean there’s no enterprise support, but it technically runs?
  - tlamponi 2mo ago
    > Maybe they mean there’s no enterprise support, but it technically runs? Yes, basically this, but in addition to us not providing a kernel and boot method targetting the RPi or other such SBC, but most of the time all will work if you bring that yourself (or plain Debian provides that for your).
- markedathome 2mo ago
  rpi4 and rpi5 both can use UEFI, and there are various people who already have Proxmox running on a PI5. jeffgeerling has a comment pinned at the top of his Level2jeff video[1], and a comment to that has a link to a rpi5 uefi repository. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg263L1W97w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg263L1W97w
- hagbard_c 2mo ago
  I've installed Proxmox on RasPi 4 and up using an unofficial port, it has been running without problems for several years. Now that there is an officially supported version it should only get easier no matter what Proxmox-the-company states.
- kevinday 2mo ago
  The Orange Pi 6 Plus is full UEFI and boots things like FreeBSD natively. It's a bit higher end than a Raspberry Pi, but they're definitely in the SBC market. I'd assume they'll work with Proxmox if they support the newish 5G ethernet chips out of the box.
  - walrus01 2mo ago
    That thing is apparently $366 USD with 16GB of RAM, so my first thought is really "it had damn well better boot things properly if it costs so much".
    - doubled112 2mo ago
      A Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is $425CAD right now ($300 USD) which isn’t a huge gap. The price on SBCs is insanity right now because they have RAM.
- ValdikSS 2mo ago
  >Maybe it'll make the SBC market get its stuff together and start actually doing UEFI instead of every board needing a custom build. If your board needs custom build, it's probably because there's no SPI flash with the bootloader. The board can't describe itself. This could be solved https://sd-card-images.johang.se/ https://sd-card-images.johang.se/ style: single kernel+rootfs OS image, with the small board-specific bootloader + dtb, which you concatenate to the OS image. The majority of ARM SBCs can boot UEFI (TianoCore) as a u-boot payload, there are ports for many SoCs/platforms. Raspberry Pi has a port. Libre.computer ships Amlogic and Rockchip with UEFI out of the box. Nobody just usually bothers because modern u-boot handles all aspects of boot process, incl. display and user interaction. Unless you want Windows on ARM, or want to use beefy server/desktop hardware (ARM non-SBC, non-embedded) with external PCI-e boards which may want to run its embedded .efi rom, you probably don't want UEFI.
  - ChocolateGod 2mo ago
    > This could be solved https://sd-card-images.johang.se/ https://sd-card-images.johang.se/ style: single kernel+rootfs OS image, with the small board-specific bootloader + dtb, which you concatenate to the OS image. This is what NixOS does as well, but it still requires the kernel to effectively have support for your specific SoC. On ARM ACPI/UEFI, ACPI abstracts many parts away reducing the need for this.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
- walrus01 2mo ago
  Let's say that one does want to use a raspberry pi as a hypervisor and run a bunch of VMs on it... But why? A raspberry pi 5 with current market pricing for the 8GB or 16GB model is a really bad price/performance decision. Not when you can go to ebay and get a 16GB RAM gently used, ultra small form factor corporate desktop, quad core intel core i5/i7 computer for less money. With real NVME SSD and such. Yeah, it'll consume more like 25 watts idle, not 7W, but as a hypervisor platform it'll also be vastly more capable. The raspberry pi with 1GB RAM have some very good use cases for things that need their I/O pins, but if you're just trying to use it as a general purpose computer, there's so many other better options.
  - antonkochubey 2mo ago
    There are some lucky people (e.g. me) who got high-RAM Pi4's and Pi5's before the prices spiked
- proxysna 2mo ago
  You can run it on a anything. Now officially. About a year back i had proxmox cluster on 3 orange pi 5+. As long as you have a some sort of Debian it's pretty seamless.
- Gormo 2mo ago
  Sounds like it will work with DGX Spark, though.
- ValdikSS 2mo ago
  https://github.com/armbian/configng/pull/965 https://github.com/armbian/configng/pull/965
rnantes 2mo ago
Would be cool to run this on Snapdragon X Mini PCs in a 10 inch rack
awesomeusername 2mo ago
I literally am in the process of migrating away from proxmox because they said publicly they would not support arm. This was necessary, but guys you got the memo too late
- JuniperMesos 2mo ago
  What are you migrating to?
  - TacticalCoder 2mo ago
    Don't know about GP but... Something that's not a collection of Perl scripts?
    - JuniperMesos 2mo ago
      Certainly the fact that Proxmox heavily uses perl is a strike against it. I'm genuinely curious what some reasonable alternatives to it are.
      - jbotz 2mo ago
        Incus[0] is one. [0] https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/ https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/
      - tlamponi 2mo ago
        > Certainly the fact that Proxmox heavily uses perl is a strike against it. Besides that being very outdated view of our tech stack, given that we have used Rust for every new development for seven years already and migrated lots of Perl code to it - what's actually wrong with using Perl? Is all Perl, Python, etc., generically just categorally unusable for someone? Or is the fact that Perl - just like Python and many other languages - packs a lot of built-in features while being easy to modify and interpretable so it can also be used for scripting purposes seriously counted as a "strike against it"? Genuinely curious where these - for me completely unrelatable - opinions stem from.
ece 2mo ago
This would be interesting on a Spark or two. I don't know how seamless the GPU and networking cluster setup would be when resource sharing between agent and post-training VMs.
- moondev 2mo ago
  Unfortunately as of today DGX Spark doesn't support GPU PCI passrhru for KVM A good alternative is incus and running LXC and or OCI containers, GPU works in those and can be shared with multiple instances
nh43215rgb 2mo ago
> Device-tree-only single-board computers, such as the Raspberry Pi, are not supported > Virtual machines always boot through UEFI, provided by the ARM build of OVMF (AAVMF). SeaBIOS is not available on arm64. Few things to be wary of..!
- tredre3 2mo ago
  > Device-tree-only single-board computers, such as the Raspberry Pi, are not supported Good. The more software vendors require UEFI, the more arm board manufacturers will have to support it. As an embedded developer I don't hate device-tree-only devices per se, and I have the skills to make any distro (that supports ARM) work on any board, but I absolutely do not have the patience to do it.
- antonkochubey 2mo ago
  FWIW there exist UEFI implementations for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, they can be used to boot Windows 11 aarch64 images as well as 'generic' Linux distro images, so I suppose they will support this one as well.
  - protimewaster 2mo ago
    I was curious about this, so I looked it up just now. It looks like the project providing UEFI for the Raspberry Pi 5 is abandoned, and compatibility with newer board revisions is reported to be broken (if I correctly understand their "end of support" message on the repo).
- ChrisRR 2mo ago
  I must be out of the loop because I thought all ARM devices needed a device tree
snthpy 2mo ago
Oh this is awesome. Going to try this on my OCI Ampere instance.
eventualcomp 2mo ago
If I could install PVE on my M series Mac, nothing would make me happier. It would be such a nice way to recycle such hardware once I finally upgrade.

96 points by geerlingguy 2mo ago

Corpo-only support, Q: Can I run Proxmox VE on a Raspberry Pi or a similar single-board computer? A: No. An arm64 host must boot through UEFI and describe its hardware through ACPI. Device-tree-only boards and legacy boot are not supported. Basically no consumer facing arm SBCs, NAS boxes, etc will work with this. Frankly, I see this as a good thing though: Maybe it'll make the SBC market get its stuff together and start actually doing UEFI instead of every board needing a custom build.

geerlingguy 2mo ago
Technically it will run on Pis — someone in my YouTube comments already has it going on top of basic Pi OS 13 (disabled NetworkManager and cloud-init to get it going). Someone else on Mastodon already has it running via a custom Pi 4 UEFI image. I'm adding more details in my blog post here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/proxmox-ve-arm-official/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/proxmox-ve-arm-offici...
drdexebtjl 2mo ago
Someone in the forum thread reports it runs on their Pi. I don’t see why it couldn’t work, since Debian runs fine on these SBCs. Maybe they mean there’s no enterprise support, but it technically runs?
- tlamponi 2mo ago
  > Maybe they mean there’s no enterprise support, but it technically runs? Yes, basically this, but in addition to us not providing a kernel and boot method targetting the RPi or other such SBC, but most of the time all will work if you bring that yourself (or plain Debian provides that for your).
markedathome 2mo ago
rpi4 and rpi5 both can use UEFI, and there are various people who already have Proxmox running on a PI5. jeffgeerling has a comment pinned at the top of his Level2jeff video[1], and a comment to that has a link to a rpi5 uefi repository. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg263L1W97w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg263L1W97w
hagbard_c 2mo ago
I've installed Proxmox on RasPi 4 and up using an unofficial port, it has been running without problems for several years. Now that there is an officially supported version it should only get easier no matter what Proxmox-the-company states.
kevinday 2mo ago
The Orange Pi 6 Plus is full UEFI and boots things like FreeBSD natively. It's a bit higher end than a Raspberry Pi, but they're definitely in the SBC market. I'd assume they'll work with Proxmox if they support the newish 5G ethernet chips out of the box.
- walrus01 2mo ago
  That thing is apparently $366 USD with 16GB of RAM, so my first thought is really "it had damn well better boot things properly if it costs so much".
  - doubled112 2mo ago
    A Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is $425CAD right now ($300 USD) which isn’t a huge gap. The price on SBCs is insanity right now because they have RAM.
ValdikSS 2mo ago
>Maybe it'll make the SBC market get its stuff together and start actually doing UEFI instead of every board needing a custom build. If your board needs custom build, it's probably because there's no SPI flash with the bootloader. The board can't describe itself. This could be solved https://sd-card-images.johang.se/ https://sd-card-images.johang.se/ style: single kernel+rootfs OS image, with the small board-specific bootloader + dtb, which you concatenate to the OS image. The majority of ARM SBCs can boot UEFI (TianoCore) as a u-boot payload, there are ports for many SoCs/platforms. Raspberry Pi has a port. Libre.computer ships Amlogic and Rockchip with UEFI out of the box. Nobody just usually bothers because modern u-boot handles all aspects of boot process, incl. display and user interaction. Unless you want Windows on ARM, or want to use beefy server/desktop hardware (ARM non-SBC, non-embedded) with external PCI-e boards which may want to run its embedded .efi rom, you probably don't want UEFI.
- ChocolateGod 2mo ago
  > This could be solved https://sd-card-images.johang.se/ https://sd-card-images.johang.se/ style: single kernel+rootfs OS image, with the small board-specific bootloader + dtb, which you concatenate to the OS image. This is what NixOS does as well, but it still requires the kernel to effectively have support for your specific SoC. On ARM ACPI/UEFI, ACPI abstracts many parts away reducing the need for this.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
walrus01 2mo ago
Let's say that one does want to use a raspberry pi as a hypervisor and run a bunch of VMs on it... But why? A raspberry pi 5 with current market pricing for the 8GB or 16GB model is a really bad price/performance decision. Not when you can go to ebay and get a 16GB RAM gently used, ultra small form factor corporate desktop, quad core intel core i5/i7 computer for less money. With real NVME SSD and such. Yeah, it'll consume more like 25 watts idle, not 7W, but as a hypervisor platform it'll also be vastly more capable. The raspberry pi with 1GB RAM have some very good use cases for things that need their I/O pins, but if you're just trying to use it as a general purpose computer, there's so many other better options.
- antonkochubey 2mo ago
  There are some lucky people (e.g. me) who got high-RAM Pi4's and Pi5's before the prices spiked
proxysna 2mo ago
You can run it on a anything. Now officially. About a year back i had proxmox cluster on 3 orange pi 5+. As long as you have a some sort of Debian it's pretty seamless.
Gormo 2mo ago
Sounds like it will work with DGX Spark, though.
ValdikSS 2mo ago
https://github.com/armbian/configng/pull/965 https://github.com/armbian/configng/pull/965

rnantes 2mo ago

Would be cool to run this on Snapdragon X Mini PCs in a 10 inch rack

awesomeusername 2mo ago

I literally am in the process of migrating away from proxmox because they said publicly they would not support arm. This was necessary, but guys you got the memo too late

JuniperMesos 2mo ago
What are you migrating to?
- TacticalCoder 2mo ago
  Don't know about GP but... Something that's not a collection of Perl scripts?
  - JuniperMesos 2mo ago
    Certainly the fact that Proxmox heavily uses perl is a strike against it. I'm genuinely curious what some reasonable alternatives to it are.
    - jbotz 2mo ago
      Incus[0] is one. [0] https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/ https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/
    - tlamponi 2mo ago
      > Certainly the fact that Proxmox heavily uses perl is a strike against it. Besides that being very outdated view of our tech stack, given that we have used Rust for every new development for seven years already and migrated lots of Perl code to it - what's actually wrong with using Perl? Is all Perl, Python, etc., generically just categorally unusable for someone? Or is the fact that Perl - just like Python and many other languages - packs a lot of built-in features while being easy to modify and interpretable so it can also be used for scripting purposes seriously counted as a "strike against it"? Genuinely curious where these - for me completely unrelatable - opinions stem from.

ece 2mo ago

This would be interesting on a Spark or two. I don't know how seamless the GPU and networking cluster setup would be when resource sharing between agent and post-training VMs.

moondev 2mo ago
Unfortunately as of today DGX Spark doesn't support GPU PCI passrhru for KVM A good alternative is incus and running LXC and or OCI containers, GPU works in those and can be shared with multiple instances

nh43215rgb 2mo ago

> Device-tree-only single-board computers, such as the Raspberry Pi, are not supported > Virtual machines always boot through UEFI, provided by the ARM build of OVMF (AAVMF). SeaBIOS is not available on arm64. Few things to be wary of..!

tredre3 2mo ago
> Device-tree-only single-board computers, such as the Raspberry Pi, are not supported Good. The more software vendors require UEFI, the more arm board manufacturers will have to support it. As an embedded developer I don't hate device-tree-only devices per se, and I have the skills to make any distro (that supports ARM) work on any board, but I absolutely do not have the patience to do it.
antonkochubey 2mo ago
FWIW there exist UEFI implementations for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, they can be used to boot Windows 11 aarch64 images as well as 'generic' Linux distro images, so I suppose they will support this one as well.
- protimewaster 2mo ago
  I was curious about this, so I looked it up just now. It looks like the project providing UEFI for the Raspberry Pi 5 is abandoned, and compatibility with newer board revisions is reported to be broken (if I correctly understand their "end of support" message on the repo).
ChrisRR 2mo ago
I must be out of the loop because I thought all ARM devices needed a device tree

snthpy 2mo ago

Oh this is awesome. Going to try this on my OCI Ampere instance.

eventualcomp 2mo ago

If I could install PVE on my M series Mac, nothing would make me happier. It would be such a nice way to recycle such hardware once I finally upgrade.