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

181–190 of 269 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#181

Post by sangnoir »

joezydeco wrote: post #107
grahamm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I too, am tired of giving that reply - I don't know why the issue must be continually raised on every Pi article; it's a little patronizing ("Oh, those poor Pi users don't know any better"), and that grates when you have researched and ended up with the Pi as the best-fit.

Both things are true - yes the Pi is not the most robust SBC on the market, but the Pi also offers the best value for money hobbyists and tinkerers. You (generalized) and I have completely different priorities and we will accept very different trade-offs: price is important to me - reliability, not as much. I would rather drop $40 on an SBC that may or may not kill my $5-$15 SD card in the next few months than spend >$100 on a rock-solid eMMC-/CF-based one. Most of Pi users are hobbyists who are not running critical code, if it fails they will fix it next weekend. Maybe.

If the pros fail to understand that the needs of hobbyists are different, then this back-and-forth will never cease.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#182

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

The thing helping the Raspberry Pi fend off clones is their deal with Broadcom, not whether the board, firmware, and boot code are open or closed source. It's easy to copy the board and binary blobs either way. The closed nature of the boot code hurts tinkering without helping sales.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#183

Post by stedaniels »

paulmd wrote: post #97
grahamm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can't imagine having to sysadmin a bunch of raspberry pis in a serious "production" setting with all the reliability problems they have, that would be godawful, you'd go through a brace of SD cards every month

If you avoid the extremely common mistake of mounting the SD card RW instead of RO then Pi problems are negligible.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#184

Post by enobrev »

entropie wrote: post #98
enobrev wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Do you know homeassistant? https://github.com/home-assistant/plugin-audio

Yes. I have a lot of respect for the HA project, but I stopped using it last year. It changed far too much for me too much keep up at the time, and I ran into too many issues with the zwave support at the time.

Thanks for the link.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#185

Post by enobrev »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #118
enobrev wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I use Moode Audio. https://moodeaudio.org

This looks great. Thank you

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#186

Post by 3np »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #162
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.

>looking for more ideas 1. MotionEye can help set your own local security camera setup. 2. PiHole with Unbound can help setup network wide ad blocking and DNS over TLS. 3. SDR (DVB-T dongle) with rtl_433 can receive 433Mhz communication from your sensors like Fire Alarm, Gas Sensor, Car key etc. and notify you. 4. MQTT server on a Pi can act as a local notification server, MQTT client on your phone can receive notifi…

On 4, what MQTT broker(s) would you recommend? I’be been reading up a bit on different alternatives[0] for something lightweight with not too many dependencies to run clustered/HA and haven’t figured out which one to try yet.

[0] https://github.com/hobbyquaker/awesome-mqtt

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#187

Post by 3np »

bane wrote: post #158
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.

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 t…

mopidy/mpd

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#188

Post by IshKebab »

tenantless wrote: post #160
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.

I think there are probably plenty of commercial devices for which the raspberry pi compute module makes perfect sense. Think about things like PoS terminals, information kiosks, digital signage. Why would you bother making your own hardware for those when a raspberry pi is exactly what you want and way cheaper.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#189

Post by enobrev »

hanklazard wrote: post #112
enobrev wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Not the parent but I have a similar setup. I use volumio music software on 4 raspberry pi 3b+, each with a hifiberry amp to drive speakers. If you couple these with snapcast, you have a diy whole house sonos-like setup. Works well and I control volumes through home assistant. Not familiar with netbooting, but will be looking into it!

I had been considering a similar setup and then got a notification for a barely used htd lync12 with amps on Craigslist at an insanely good price and hopped right on it. I've spent the past year or so wiring up the house a room at a time, which has been painful and sometimes stressful. But I've become such a huge fan of the simplicity and stability of a wired setup that it's all been absolutely worth it.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll give volumio a closer look.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#190

Post by laumars »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #132
pbalau wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably should read that link, section "DHCP Request / Reply". Virtually the entire world uses PXE. Anyway, I find it funny that we are arguing about the proper name for network boot in a thread about usb boot.

OK sure. :) I guess what I meant was, if you're setup for booting Pis, you can't also boot arbitrary PCs without extra work.

Not much extra work I’d have thought. You might need to hardcode the Pis MAC address in your preferred DCHP server but the rest of the config should be equivalent.

I’ve already got isc-dhcpd running with PXE booting for x86 / AMD64 machines so might add some rules in for the Pis too.

Thanks for the heads up by the way. I hadn’t realised you could network boot Raspberry Pis.

Post reply on HN