Best decision I ever made was setting up a Pi netboot server on my LAN. Now I have a whole bunch of Pi 3's and 4's scattered around my home with no local storage at all doing cool things, and I can make them boot into a completely different OS just by renaming a symlink on the server.
Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
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Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
#32Not a fan of Raspberry Pi. It hides behind proprietary Broadcom chip, no DSI/MIPI support and you're at the mercy of Raspberry PI for any sort of commercial implementation (RPi Zero and independent module). They do guarantee upto 2026 availability for their DIMM modules which is nice. We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature.
What they should do is to leverage their position in the market and convince Broadcom to open source the bootloader and drivers. There are a bunch of binary blobs from Broadcom that are a mystery as to what they do. No docs, no anything. HAL layer is completely at the mercy of Raspbery Pi.
Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing.
If you want to support proper open source development (I understand, at some point things get proprietary the closer you get to the hardware, but with RPi, there isn't even a datasheet for the processor that you can get your hands on), buy Beagle board and other alternatives.
Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
#33From this page [1] on Raspberry Pi's Docs it seems like it's been like that for a while. Had there been a big change with this ROM specifically? [1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
The 4 is a bit different under the hood (as evidenced by the different procedures). There was support on the older models, while the 4 launched without it.
Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
#34Not a fan of Raspberry Pi. It hides behind proprietary Broadcom chip, no DSI/MIPI support and you're at the mercy of Raspberry PI for any sort of commercial implementation (RPi Zero and independent module). They do guarantee upto 2026 availability for their DIMM modules which is nice. We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature. What they should do is to leverage their po…
Agreed. Thoe closed-source blobs and lack of docs also made it hard for WoA folks to write proper drivers for RPi4. I remember they had this beyond 3GB PCIE memory corruption issue for quite a long which is only recently fixed. I hope they can reverse engineer the GPU tho, it is nightmarish.
Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
#35Not a fan of Raspberry Pi. It hides behind proprietary Broadcom chip, no DSI/MIPI support and you're at the mercy of Raspberry PI for any sort of commercial implementation (RPi Zero and independent module). They do guarantee upto 2026 availability for their DIMM modules which is nice. We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature. What they should do is to leverage their po…
> Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing
It depends on what layer you care about. At the application layer it is completely open. Even if the chip designs and drivers were open source, you could claim that there are proprietary processes and supply chains for the hardware and material themselves. Unless amateurs could build one from scratch you will never be satisfied.
Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
#36Best decision I ever made was setting up a Pi netboot server on my LAN. Now I have a whole bunch of Pi 3's and 4's scattered around my home with no local storage at all doing cool things, and I can make them boot into a completely different OS just by renaming a symlink on the server.
What are you using for a filesystem? NFS?
My worry would be saturating the older 100Mbit connections when downloading things like docker images.
Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
#37Best decision I ever made was setting up a Pi netboot server on my LAN. Now I have a whole bunch of Pi 3's and 4's scattered around my home with no local storage at all doing cool things, and I can make them boot into a completely different OS just by renaming a symlink on the server.
> Now I have a whole bunch of Pi 3's and 4's scattered around my home with no local storage at all doing cool things
Elaborate? I have a single pi3 as a Plex server, looking for more ideas.
Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
#38It's nice but I'm honestly baffled that it's seen as such a big deal as it's pretty trivial to make grub boot off USB, leaving the SDcard only being used doing the initial boot. Is it just about the convenience?
Instead of downvoting me, maybe you could explain what I'm missing?
> Instead of downvoting me, maybe you could explain what I'm missing?
I didn't downvote you, just my opinion:
> it's pretty trivial to make grub boot off USB, leaving the SDcard only being used doing the initial boot
In that case you still need an SDcard, and it requires manual setup. With this you can truly boot from USB drives easily WITHOUT the SD card.
Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC, enabling usb mass storage boot involves setting some OTP bits, which permanently disables usb host boot. But AFAIK, the 3B doesn't support usb host boot anyways. Is there any feature you could lose by enabling mass storage boot in this case?
I think (but haven't checked) that you lose the ability to boot from a microSD. I just switched it to USB because I wanted higher reliability for a semi-permanent installation and never checked if it would boot from SD if I removed the USB.
It will still boot from SD. Enabling USB boot just adds USB booting at the end of the list of things checked to boot from.
Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
#40Not a fan of Raspberry Pi. It hides behind proprietary Broadcom chip, no DSI/MIPI support and you're at the mercy of Raspberry PI for any sort of commercial implementation (RPi Zero and independent module). They do guarantee upto 2026 availability for their DIMM modules which is nice. We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature. What they should do is to leverage their po…
> Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing It depends on what layer you care about. At the application layer it is completely open. Even if the chip designs and drivers were open source, you could claim that there are proprietary processes and supply chains for the hardware and material themselves. Unless amateurs could build one from sc…
I mean, you're not wrong and it is open source at the app layer but it's not like Raspberry Pi is a purely software product. They're a hardware company, acting like a maker friendly, open source device - similar to Arduino (which btw is totally open source, even the bootloader and you can get data sheets for every single component on it), but it falls short with only the top app layer being open source. The middle layer (HAL, drivers, etc.) is all closed source. And hardware is closed source.
It's ok to be closed source IMO, but they should not be marketing themselves like Arduino folks.