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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

#101

Post by StillBored »

zbrozek wrote: post #62
LeoPanthera wrote: post #31

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.

I did this, but using a more traditional server. It was... OK. The pi3b+ bootloader was flaky and I ended up needing an SD card with just the kernel on it, but I wanted it ro. This made updating kind of touchy. I can imagine that if they've made the bootloader more robust on the pi4 that this is truly excellent now.

If you already have the SD card and USB, your probably better off using https://github.com/pftf/RPi3/releases/tag/v1.30 which is a open source UEFI implementation. Its far more capable of dealing with underlying os updates using your OS's preferred update method. You put the UEFI firmware on the SD, update the config.txt to point at it, and then pretend the rpi is a normal x86/uefi system and use apt/zypper/dnf/whatever for updates (including the kernel). Everything then boots/runs/updates off the USB disk.

The arm ecosystem seems to be slowly moving to some form of UEFI+grub boot for all the linux/etc distributions and away from all these platform specific boot methods.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#102

Post by maxioatic »

paines wrote: post #78
maxioatic wrote: post #50

Might be a silly question because I'm a noob in this area, but: Does this work with the official Ubuntu images or only Raspbian?

From the github page ( https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/28 ) you can see that this needs an updated firmware which you can install via rpi-update. Never used Ubuntu on the Pi only raspbian, but I am sure they also have those rpi tools. How does Ubuntu run on the Pi work? I never got passed installation, because after install the first boot just hangs. It seems to me it wants to install additional stuf…

Hmm, I'll have to check it out.

I think it works great. Using the 64 bit 20.04 and now 20.04.1, I've had no problems with my 4 4Gb Pi4s (so many 4s!). You should be able to set up the wifi using netplan, although I do only run mine wired so haven't tried it.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#103

Post by ausjke »

scottlamb wrote: post #84
rektide wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

at that price range why not just go all the way to mini-itx, when you hook SATA etc you will need a larger case with some cooling space inside, mini-itx seems to be a much more practical option then, a quick search found https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813157930 there are many to choose from actually.

or just nano-itx, both are easier to get cases and power supplies etc.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#104

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

therealx wrote: post #72
LeoPanthera wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netboot instructions are here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... The important bit is that it will look for its boot files in a subdirectory named the serial number of the Pi. Only if that fails will it look in the root. So I have symlinks for the serial numbers of all my Pis that point to whatever OS I want to boot.

Very interesting it looks for the serial number and not the MAC address!

Pretty sure that's because the pi doesn't actually have a hardcoded MAC; I think I've read that it's just set in software and persisted by the OS, which is weird but workable right up until there is no local storage to persist on.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#105

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

benn_88 wrote: post #54
systemvoltage wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

Arduino is a for-profit company with open source hardware; Raspberry Pi is a charity with closed-source hardware. Nothing wrong with either approach. But your comment makes out they're a for-profit company with closed-source hardware acting like the good guys. Not sure it's fair to label them as just another company when they're not-for-profit and pump all their money into a) product development and b) education prog…

> To be honest, if the Pi was open source hardware, everyone would buy the clones (like they do with the Arduino ones) and the charity side would have much less funding.

As opposed to now, when people buy such totally-not-clones as the Banana Pi and Orange Pi? For that matter, Arduino seems to somehow have stayed profitable in spite of getting murdered from every angle by the clones.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#106

Post by joshspankit »

blibble wrote: post #96
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?

I actually tried this and it turned out to be quite a bit more complicated than predicted, due to clocks on the pis being slightly different "I'll just sling udp multicast of the PCM samples around the network, can't be that hard right?" ended up using MPD with pulseaudio over TCP, and they get out of sync after a few minutes, but good enough

The different clocks is a real hurdle.

I have to give credit to Apple on this one, as they had the genius idea to make the buffer >1s, and send control messages independent of the audio stream.

There’s gotta be a way to do it with PTP and the same ideas but clearly it’s either an extremely difficult problem, too niche, or both.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#107

Post by joezydeco »

grahamm wrote: post #82
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…

I’m tired of pointing this out. The reply is consistently “So what? It’s my cheap Linux SBC now and until you can find something better for $40, go away.”

I‘be been booting off of eMMC on an A7 for years now. I don’t get any of this anymore.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#108

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

agustif wrote: post #92

Is thhere any way to use OS X on a Pi? Asking for a friend

Technically it should be possible, since Darwin at least used to run in qemu. But... it's gonna suck performance-wise, since you're emulating x86_64 on AArch64, and of course I don't need to remind you of the legal issues. And, for that matter, that we're basically talking about a hackintosh VM, so don't expect long-term stability.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#110

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

cogburnd02 wrote: post #30

I wonder if this will help improve its status on https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers , moving it out of the category of SBCs which have "fatal flaws"

Boot media isn't the problem, proprietary firmware is, and that's not changing here.
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