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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

#171

Post by vinw »

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

Take a look at snapcast if you want to fix your out-of-syncness

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#172

Post by loxias »

agustif wrote: post #92

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

I've run OS X on a very low powered Debian box before. I'd wager it could be made to run on a raspi 4 (VERY SLOWLY) with sufficient effort. (you'd have to use qemu TCG, not KVM).

It would be easier to run on a SBC that uses an x86_64 chip, like the Atomic Pi, or LattePanda.

I'm curious though, why in the world would you ever want to run OS X so slowly?

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#173

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#174

Post by mikorym »

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.

What happens when you get a power cut?

Or, assuming you are from a well functioning country, what would happen and how would you restart?

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#175

Post by Dylan16807 »

joshspankit wrote: post #144
MisterAV wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the requirement for synched audio? milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds,... I'm currently working on devices that synchronises themselves wirelessly indoor over a large area and I'm now wondering if music could be an application I haven't though about...

At most 10ms. Sub 1ms would be awesome. And yes, definitely. If you can build in a “chromecast receiver” so that a user could cast to multiple synced speakers (at full quality), you’d definitely have my attention

It's worth noting that for two speakers playing the same audio, a 5ms offset will move the point of perfect sync by less than a meter. Going below a millisecond is definitely overkill territory.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#176

Post by stedaniels »

mikorym wrote: post #174
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.

What happens when you get a power cut? Or, assuming you are from a well functioning country, what would happen and how would you restart?

I'm not sure I see the problem. Most servers will come up before a netboot/PXE boot timeout. At least in my experience they do.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#177

Post by Dylan16807 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #165
pishpash wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the fault of Pi hardware when it still refuses to provide a hardware shutdown button for proper file system unmounts, after all these years.

Machines no longer degrade when the power is yanked. Any corruption caused by a mid-write devoltage event is handled gracefully by whatever modern filesystem of choice you are using, is it not? Is there some more fundamental hardware damage that occurs when USB devices are unplugged without prior warning to the device itself?

Because of large erase blocks, it's unavoidable that a flash device needs to involve some kind of very careful bookkeeping and sector-shifting to safely handle power loss during writes. Otherwise it could lose a big chunk of sectors unrelated to what you were actually writing, and that's not something a filesystem can paper over. I barely trust a proper SSD controller to do this, let alone whatever cheap thing is in an SD card or flash drive.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#178

Post by sangnoir »

pishpash wrote: post #145
stjohnswarts wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I supported 40 of them (rpi 3) as remote serial hosts and custom reboot/repower for a QA farm. Not a single one failed and don't think I had a single issue during that whole time. As far as I know it's still going just fine. It was a cheap and dependable solution. 99% of the SD card issues go away when you don't cheap out and don't go cheap. get a large card that is 32GB plus from a respectable vendor. That's no…

It is the fault of Pi hardware when it still refuses to provide a hardware shutdown button for proper file system unmounts, after all these years.

With the number of GPIO pins available - you could always wire-up one yourself if a physical button is important to you.

That said, I don't think the Pi was ever designed for "serious" industrial usage; I don't think the production runs (or the foundation) could support that, without undoing the core mission.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#179

Post by fredley »

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.

Surprised not to see Pi Hole on that list!

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#180

Post by maxioatic »

geerlingguy wrote: post #157
maxioatic wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I thought you'd stop by this thread! Thanks for all your work, it's very helpful and much appreciated.
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