What is BerryOS ?

BerryOS is a lightweight distribution of Raspberry Pi OS, meant to be used as a clean base when configuring a new Raspberry Pi. It focuses on providing a lighter operating system than can be configured headlessly at first boot.

It was born out of the frustration of not being able to configure Raspberry Pi OS Lite using cloud-init easily and the fact that alternatives such as Ubuntu includes way too many pieces of software by default (such as snapd or unattended-upgrades which can chew RAM and CPU cycles).

Overview

Compatible hardware

BerryOS is available in two variant, a 32-bit version called BerryOS/armhf and a 64-bit version called BerryOS/arm64. Each image should have the same compatibility as their Raspberry Pi OS counterpart meaning:

• BerryOS/armhf should be compatible with ALL Raspberry Pi models
• BerryOS/arm64 should be compatible with:
  • Raspberry Pi 3 B
  • Raspberry Pi 3 B+
  • Raspberry Pi 4
  • Raspberry Pi 400
  • Raspberry Compute Module 3
  • Raspberry Compute Module 3 +
  • Raspberry Compute Module 4
  • Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
  • Raspberry Pi 5

Each release is tested on the following hardware:

• Raspberry Pi 2 B (armhf)
• Raspberry Pi 3 B (armhf & arm64)
• Raspberry Pi 3 B+ (armhf & arm64)

Due to its nature, it should also provide the same level of compatibility with 3rd party software and hardware as Raspberry Pi OS.

Similarities and differences with Raspberry Pi OS Lite

The goal of the images provided by BerryOS is to provide a similar user experience to Raspberry Pi OS Lite while including as little pre-installed packages as possible and making unattended provisioning possible.

To do so, BerryOS is bootstrapped from the same base as Raspberry Pi OS Lite with a reduced list of package installed by default and the following changes to the default configuration:

• Addition of cloud-init to handle unattended provisioning at first boot
• Addition of netplan to handle Wi-Fi configuration using cloud-init
• openssh enabled by default
• Serial console disabled by default
• Bluetooth support not configured by default
• No swapfile configured by default
• wpa_supplicant installed and configured but disabled by default
• Support for /boot/config.toml removed in favor of cloud-init (see #5 and #15)

On the other hand, some services have been kept as is from Raspberry Pi such as:

• fake-hwclock to emulate a hardware clock by committing current date to disk periodically
• rngd to enable random number generation offloading to the hardware (provided by rng-tools5)
• systemd-timesyncd to handle network time synchronization (configurable via cloud-init)

In the end, BerryOS is just a stripped down version of Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Stage 2) with the addition of cloud-init & netplan, making it the perfect base to self-host any application your Raspberry Pi.

Default environment

If not configured using /boot/firmware/user-data, BerryOS will be provisioned using its default configuration, this default environment will include the default user accessible via:

• Username: pi
• Password: raspberry

To follow the decision made by the Raspberry Pi OS team in April 2022, access to this default user via SSH will be DISABLED by default. In order to access your system headlessly and configure SSH access, follow the "Getting started" guide down below.

This default environment will also try to:

• Enable and configure eth0 using DHCP
• Synchronize time with the default NTP pool (debian.pool.ntp.org)

Getting Started

• Download the latest version of BerryOS for your targeted architecture from the latest release and flash it on your SD card using your tool of choice
• Unplug and re-plug your SD card from your computer to discover newly created partition
• Open the user-data file from the boot partition of your SD card with your favorite editor
• Uncomment Configure default user access section and update it to your need
• We suggest reading through the whole file to see all the possible configuration available before continuing
• Unmount your SD card, insert it in your Raspberry Pi, plug your Ethernet cable and provide it with power
• Congratulation, you are now running BerryOS !

A more detailed explanation of most of what can be configured using cloud-init is available in this project documentation. A set of example user-data file is also available.

Benchmark

Benchmarked on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ connected to internet via Ethernet using DHCP running the following commands after first-boot:

• RAM usage: free -th | mawk '/^Total:/{print $3}'
• Running processes: pstree -Ta (removing the current user session, i.e: login -p & systemctl --user processes)
• Disk usage: findmnt -no USED /
• Pre-installed packages: dpkg --get-selections | wc -l

Download and image sizes have been calculated using ls -l --block-size=M.

BerryOS/armhf

Stat	BerryOS Bookworm (2024.07.21)	RaspiOS Lite Bookworm (2024-07-04)
RAM usage	99M	110M
Running processes	10	16
Disk usage	880M	1.7G
Pre-installed packages	333	603
Download size	361M	500M
Image size	1344M	2512M

BerryOS/arm64

Stat	BerryOS Bookworm (2024.07.21)	RaspiOS Lite Bookworm (2024-07-04)
RAM usage	116M	131M
Running processes	10	16
Disk usage	856M	1.8G
Pre-installed packages	310	590
Download size	288M	432M
Image size	1296M	2704M

Acknowledgements

This project has been heavily inspired by the work previously done by the team at Hypriot for their HypriotOS. It was the starting point of this project and this project wouldn't exist without it.

The RPi-Distro/pi-gen, RPi-Distro/raspi-config & RPi-Distro/raspberrypi-sys-mods projects have also been very helpful when tackling some hardware specific issues and optimizing image creation.

To the team responsible for those great pieces of software, thank you !