Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 269 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#151

Post by pabs3 »

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…

There is libre RPi boot firmware, unfortunately it relies on toolchain support that isn't upstream yet:

https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/itszor/vc4-toolchain/issues/7

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#152

Post by pabs3 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #93
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing. In a world increasingly more virtualized, multilayered, and interconnected, how would you ensure "purity" in that regard? And can you?

I think if they had the following done right, it would be pretty much on par with open source hardware/software expectations: 1. Hardware datasheets for all components 2. Bootloader available to view the source for, if not completely open source. I understand bootloader can be proprietary tech and they can use non-commercial compete license but allow people to hack them and at the very least view it. 3. All PCB and g…

There is an open bootloader, sadly it needs a non-upstream toolchain:

https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/itszor/vc4-toolchain/issues/7

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#153

Post by askvictor »

agustif wrote: post #92

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

Once OSX on ARM arrives, this would be a lot easier; however, I'd expect Apple's silicon would be a lot newer (and have more instructions) than the rpi's, so it might not end up being possible/feasible.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#154

Post by web007 »

ggm wrote: post #28
pronoiac wrote: post #15

Oh man I feel for the maintainers here, with the many "this isn't the place for that" and now-deleted comments. It's on my mind, as I just set up a vpn gateway on a Pi, and while I sorta want to document the process, I don't want to support randos.

Yes, the sense of frustration in the threads is palpable. Its a no-win situation: bleed time/labour dealing with "no" answers and the consequences, and get hated, or, be harsh up front, and get hated.

I feel like the RPi reps were incredibly condescending and rude in the thread. Starting with the immediate closing as a support request they were off on the wrong foot. Once they reopened, if people are looking for one place to follow for "can I boot from USB?" then their responses were between pointless and confusing:

"We have this thing updated, but it's not ready for anyone to use" so why did they send an update?

Followed predictably by "So when can we use it?"

Then they threaten the user asking about it and lock the thread, only to unlock it the next day.

All the while none of that matters, because only this week they finally got whatever was left finished (GPU firmware?) so it can work.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#155

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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?

My router / firewall is an RPi3 booting from a USB drive. A regular SD card would wear off after a few months, but a USB drive will last a long time.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#156

Post by jcims »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #136
giancarlostoro wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you host the netboot server from a workstation by chance? This is something I had never considered and it would really change things up for me, how does that even work? Is it just an installed distro or just a network image on the device it's booting from? I'm somewhat familiar with netbooting an installer but I've never setup a server just used the tech to install an OS from the network to hardware. I did bump i…

Well, that's instructions on how to setup a Pi itself to be the netboot server. That will work fine, but your DHCP server still needs to be configurable to emit the correct responses to find the TFTP server, if you don't want to use a Pi itself as your DHCP server, which I would imagine most people don't. My DHCP server is pfSense, and I'm using a FreeNAS server as the TFTP/NFS server. The Pi netboot procedure is doc…

Pi notwithstanding, it feels like this process hasn’t changed in 30 years.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#157

Post by geerlingguy »

maxioatic wrote: post #57
627467 wrote: post #27

I'd love to boot my por from usb as I have plenty of usb sticks/disks and not many as cards. Is there a performance benefit to this?

Jeff Geerling has some great and very detailed write ups on this. To quote directly from his post: "The results really speak for themselves. For sequential operations, using a USB SSD is 3-4x faster than using a microSD card."[0] [0] - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/im-booting-my-raspber... [1] - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/fastest-usb-storage-o...

Just posted more results talking about TRIM and UASP support too! https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-usb-boot...

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#158

Post by bane »

umvi wrote: post #37
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.

> 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.

Does anybody know of something that will serve up tracker and game music files (e.g. .mod, .xm, .it, and .spc, .nsf, etc.)? I'd really love to be able to use one of my Pis as a compact music server with a web interface that will on-the-fly transcode and stream these old formats. I have literally tens of thousands of these sorts of files and outside of converting them all to TBs of mp3s wouldn't mind at all to serve these up from their smaller original formats.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#159

Post by userbinator »

systemvoltage wrote: post #93
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing. In a world increasingly more virtualized, multilayered, and interconnected, how would you ensure "purity" in that regard? And can you?

I think if they had the following done right, it would be pretty much on par with open source hardware/software expectations: 1. Hardware datasheets for all components 2. Bootloader available to view the source for, if not completely open source. I understand bootloader can be proprietary tech and they can use non-commercial compete license but allow people to hack them and at the very least view it. 3. All PCB and g…

Bootloader available to view the source for, if not completely open source.

...also known as the original IBM PC/XT/AT, which had the BIOS source code available, although still copyrighted to IBM. However, documentation for everything was in general very well done, and the IBM PC Technical Reference manuals had schematics too.

An older (preferably pre-ME, pre-EFI, pre-secure-boot) standard x86 PC, which you might be able to get for free (although "retrocomputing" enthusiasts have driven demand and cost up), I would consider more open than the RPi ecosystem. More relevantly to the article, they have also been able to boot from USB since the mid 2000s. ;-)

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#160

Post by tenantless »

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…

> We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature.

I think you misspelled prototype.

Post reply on HN