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Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

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Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#81

Post by threentaway »

vetinari wrote: post #73
threentaway wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I was referring to my parent comment that talked about pulling Docker images which come from the internet unless you set up a proxy.

Ok, that depends on the docker images; things like pihole are relatively small (300 MB, including all layers); I would be more afraid of running containers over NFS slowed down by rpi ethernet, than downloading the images themselves.

Agreed. I'd have it set up so that there is some local storage via a USB3 thumb drive to hold the container images, which anecdotally pretty easily hits 80MB/s for reads, often hovering in the 100-110MB/s range.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#82

Post by grahamm »

systemvoltage wrote: post #32

Not 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…

I think people forget what it was designed for. It was to reboot IT education which was (is) badly floundering. It's success was so good it started to be used in small commercial applications. The Foundation tried to help fill this gap in the market with the compute module. Even though there is a lot of open source features the use of the Broadcom chipset was probably driven by cost as keeping the Pi price down was a factor. If a fully open source and open document solution is required perhaps the Pi isn't the right choice but then that was never it's original goal.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#83

Post by geekuillaume »

threentaway wrote: post #42
umvi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast this seems really cool, although I haven't got around to doing it myself.

Snapcast is really cool, Johannes did an awesome job! I used it for a long time at home on multiple RaspberryPis. I've been working for some time on a more user-friendly and cross-OS alternative. It's available here: https://github.com/geekuillaume/soundsync

I think I'm going to try to integrate net-boot in Soundsync this weekend. It would be awesome to be able to install Soundsync on any computer on the network, turn on an option and then just start the rPi to get it to play music.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#84

Post by scottlamb »

rektide wrote: post #76
scottlamb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to support proper open source development ... buy Beagle board and other alternatives. What more open alternatives are there with similar price and performance? The Beagleboards are ridiculously underpowered compared to a Raspberry Pi 4. I like the ODROIDs but I don't think they're any more open than Raspberry Pi. They also tend to be more expensive. YMMV on all of this stuff: * Some folks are doing mic…

Odroid series come with a wide variety of chips. The Amlogic S905X3 has good upstream support (largely via a very active volunteer community) & is on their Odroid-C4. If performance is your top concern, you should stick with x86. There's no ARM gear with anywhere near the bang/$ of an Odroid H2+, which is an rpi-like $120 x86 single-board system. It is fantastically well supported by the cpu vendor.

The ODROID H2+ is perfect for one of my applications, with the extra CPU power, second NIC, included real-time clock, onboard SATA and an official case option that fits 2 3.5" drives, and onboard eMMC socket. $120 [edit: plus RAM cost] rather than $35 is a whole other price category though.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#85

Post by jagger27 »

silicon2401 wrote: post #77

As a pi noob: does this make it more reliable/feasible to use a pi to run a home server/application/etc? I've read in the past that SD cards aren't good with repeated read/writes, which makes it somewhat unreliable in the long run. If a pi is configured to run via USB, does that make it as reliable as other consumer hardware like a pc/laptop?

Other commenters in this thread have mentioned netbooting their Pis to avoid that exact issue. A typical USB flash device won't be any more reliable than an SD card, though it might be better cooled.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#86

Post by enobrev »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #47
umvi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Two play music, one into my hifi, one into my home audio distribution system. One is setup for RetroPie. One has LibreELEC installed, showing TV from my HDHomeRun. One has a GPS hat and is a local NTP server. And one boots into an Amiga emulator because I'm very old and nostalgic.

Can I ask what software you're using for music on your home audio system? I have an HTD system with speakers throughout and while Chromecast Audio was great for a while, stability has been an issue that I'm no longer interested in hassling with.

(Also looking forward to researching this netboot solution you speak of)

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#87

Post by secondcoming »

systemvoltage wrote: post #32

Not 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…

Anything capable of playing HD content is going to have a binary blob. The Pi (at least the first version of it) used the same chipset that was in the Nokia N8. Even Nokia got given those blobs.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#88

Post by [deleted] »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #53
joshspankit wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(If you’re able to play to both simultaneously) Do the music playback devices stay in sync?

No they're independent. But if I want multiroom audio I just use my very low-tech home audio system. Most rooms have ceiling speakers that are all wired back to the garage where one of the Pi's lives.

[deleted]

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#89

Post by thisisbrians »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #80
silicon2401 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have a blog about this, or willing to share any more info? This sounds like something I'd like to start working towards

I haven't documented it, but it's very simple.

I, too, would appreciate a brief Google Doc or Pastebin on this if you can spare the time. I've never setup netboot before, but have been interested for years... reply

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#90

Post by tzs »

sokoloff wrote: post #55
tzs wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks. I wonder what's with the dire warning about changing the OTP bits then? https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

The dire warning is mostly for the 3A+, where enabling USB host boot mode (which allows booting from USB mass storage devices) will permanently prevent booting in USB device mode. (Maybe...see below).

Device mode is only supported on the Compute Module, CM3, Zero, Zero W, A, A+, and 3A+, so if you don't have one of those there is nothing to worry about as far as this goes.

It still deserves a warning on other models, but not a dire warning. It's still permanent, but it is much harder for that to be a problem. It will only be a problem if you are going to have situations where you will have a bootable USB drive attached at boot time, without a bootable SD card inserted, and you will want it to not boot rather than boot from the USB drive.

Although OTP changes are permanent, it looks like there is still a way to sort of work around the USB host boot mode one, albeit at a cost of losing access to 7 GPIOs or at least making them a lot harder to use. With another irreversible OTP change, you can tell your Pi to determine what devices to consider booting from by looking at 7 GPIOs [1]. Using GPIO boot mode, you could easily switch between SD card only, USB only, and SD followed by USB, and device mode, by just changing pull up resistors on the relevant GPIOs.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

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