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

AROS is an all-FOSS re-implementation of AmigaOS, and after years of effort, it now supports Arm kit – both 32-bit and 64-bit Raspberry Pi hardware, especially the Pi 3.

The AROS project's nightly builds page has some interesting new offerings.

Notably, there's raspi-aarch64-system for 64-bit capable Raspberry Pi hardware, including the Pi 3 and Pi Zero, and raspi-armhf-system for older ARMv6 based devices.

We first mentioned AROS 13 years ago, and last took a proper look in May 2025.

Building a version of AROS that runs natively on Arm processors has been a long term goal, as the AROS Arm support page details.

It has made good progress, though, and now the nightly images include a version which runs well on the Raspberry Pi 3. (Unfortunately, the Reg FOSS desk’s Pi 3 is currently running PiHole full-time, and Pi 4 support is slightly lagging, with no sound or networking.) There's no specific mention of what has changed on the project's Github repo, but we suspect that some judicious use of LLM has enabled this sudden burst of progress.

Since May 2026, there have been 13 commits by Claude Code.

Even so, it works.

This is an existing, human-written OS which can now boot and run on a Raspberry Pi 3.

The install images are small – only slightly over 100 MB in size – but if you want to give them a try, you should also copy the contents of the additional raspi-aarch64-contrib or raspi-armhf-contrib files, which contain an additional gigabyte of compressed files with apps, demos, accessories, and supplementary tools.

Whether or not it has been made with LLM bot assistance, we think this is an impressive step forwards.

AROS has been able to run on Arm CPUs for years, but until this, it ran hosted on top of another Arm OS – usually Linux.

Now it can boot and run on bare metal.

We feel this is a good step for several reasons.