Bring up a Raspberry Pi 4B

The Raspberry Pi 4B is the lowest-cost board in the supported target matrix. It runs SpaceOS at the system-daemon support level: Raspberry Pi OS keeps the boot path, the SpaceOS runner runs as a service on top, and unikernel workloads execute under Solo5/KVM. For the full OS support level (SpaceOS-owned boot, verified root, health-gated system releases), use the Raspberry Pi CM5; the two boards share the aarch64 architecture and the same runtime binaries.

Hardware topology

BCM2711 SoC: quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 at 1.5 GHz.
2 GB / 4 GB / 8 GB LPDDR4 variants. 4 GB or more is comfortable for development.
microSD card boot; USB-3 mass storage as a faster alternative once the bootloader is configured.
HDMI, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth on the development board.

Set up the host

Flash a standard Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) image with rpi-imager or dd.
Boot the Pi and complete first-run setup.
Confirm KVM is available:
Terminal window
```
ls /dev/kvm
lsmod | grep kvm
```
The standard 64-bit kernel includes KVM; the 32-bit kernel does not.
Install the SpaceOS runtime binaries from the release channel for your platform.
Join the board to your context as a runner:
Terminal window
```
space runner join <context> --name pi4-01
```

With KVM present, unikernel workloads run under the Solo5 hvt tender, which gives each one a hardware-isolated micro-VM; without it, the seccomp-confined spt tender is the fallback. From your workstation, space run --name <name> <image> places signed workloads onto the board, and space ps, space logs, and space stats observe them.

Selection criteria

Development. Local hardware that runs SpaceOS workloads against the Solo5/KVM substrate for a fraction of the cost of a flight computer.
Ground-test bench. Pair multiple Pis to model a multi-machine deployment; UART-link two of them to model a bus / payload two-machine topology.
Education and hackathons. SpaceOS on the Pi 4B is the standard setup for student competitions such as HACKSAT, where commodity hardware is the constraint.

The Pi 4B is a development board without verified boot. The Raspberry Pi CM5 is the deploy reference with verified boot, while the Innoflight CFC-400 is a commercial flight-computer family.