AROS, the FOSS recreation of AmigaOS, comes to Raspberry Pi

AROS, an all-FOSS recreation of AmigaOS, has now come to support Arm kit Raspberry Pi hardware, specifically the 32-bit and 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3. The AROS project has been working towards this goal for years, and after recent efforts, they have achieved success with nightly builds including raspi-aarch64-system for 64-bit capable devices like the Pi 3 and Pi Zero, and raspi-armhf-system for older ARMv6 based devices.

The project has made significant progress, with Claude Code making 13 commits since May 2026, enabling this breakthrough. AROS has been able to run on Arm CPUs for years, but now it can boot and run on bare metal. This is a significant step forward for the project, as the native platform for AROS has been x86-32, and it was previously a small fish in a big pond due to the vast array of off-the-shelf hardware for x86 PCs.

The Raspberry Pi, with its narrow platform and small number of GPUs and network interfaces, makes it easier to offer complete coverage. The Pi is also a severely constrained platform, with most older and cheaper Pis having either 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM, which is sufficient for AROS but not enough for full-justice to Linux, Windows, or any BSD with a graphical desktop.

For now, the Pi version of AROS is a prototype, incomplete, and may not be very stable, but it boots to the Workbench desktop in about five seconds. A deal with Cloanto, the company that sells AmigaForever and owns the Amiga trademarks, Kickstart ROM, and the rights to the original 680x0 AmigaOS, means that AROS can bundle the genuine original AmigaOS with TheA1200, giving it an edge in terms of compatibility with older games and original Amiga apps.