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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

#191

Post by iExploder »

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…

great point, especially since now they try to sell the "compute module" variants which are aimed at commercial use, having to use a blackbox bootloader is wtf and I dont think many companies will accept that

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#192

Post by michaelt »

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?

1. A modern filesystem will stop the filesystem getting corrupted by power loss - but a file that was mid-write, or an install process that had copied half the files it needed to, will still leave that thing incomplete.

2. SD cards can wear out (i.e. too many write-erase cycles) regardless of the filesystem.

3. SD cards have controllers running firmware, doing things like write levelling and bad block remapping. Some cards have bugs, and if the card is lying to the OS about a write completing, or if the remapping table is less resilient than the filesystem's journaling, you get problems even if the OS and everything on it is perfect.

4. Problems like pins with poor connections and power supplies not providing enough current are exacerbated, as microsds have no space for power capacitors and few SD card holders are rated for hundreds of insertion cycles.

5. SD cards start out a lot cheaper than SSDs (easier to find a sub-$10 SD card than a sub-$50 SSD) and the market is awash in fakes

All these problems look very similar - "My RPi stopped booting, I replaced the SD card with a freshly written one and it started booting again" - making forum anecdotes and user bug reports hard to rely on.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#193

Post by ggm »

web007 wrote: post #154
ggm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

I do get this, but i also get the other side. The sense of entitlement inherent in the requests, the frustration of people who can't be bothered to read before posting

(I am btw, a serial offender of this, in FreeBSD land)

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#194

Post by sambf »

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.

Emby also offers the ability to control and play stuff on other Emby devices on the same network. LibreELEC/Kodi + the Emby plugin [0] on a Pi makes it appear as an Emby device on other devices. Been using that for more than a year an it works like a charm. Plus the data is fetched from the Emby server and not device to device, so you can play something from your phone to your TV, then continue to control from your tablet while your phone is off.

[0] http://kodi.emby.media/

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#195

Post by zoobab »

colordrops wrote: post #35
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…

> Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing It depends on what layer you care about. At the application layer it is completely open. Even if the chip designs and drivers were open source, you could claim that there are proprietary processes and supply chains for the hardware and material themselves. Unless amateurs could build one from sc…

The first binary blob you boot on a Pi is based on ThreadX, a proprietary OS now bought by Microsoft.

And this binary blob fucks up the thermal control as well.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#197

Post by Dylan16807 »

mmastrac wrote: post #36
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 are you using for a filesystem? NFS? My worry would be saturating the older 100Mbit connections when downloading things like docker images.

> My worry would be saturating the older 100Mbit connections when downloading things like docker images.

Is that too slow? I feel like 30 seconds to fill up half the ram is a perfectly acceptable boot time.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#198

Post by MayeulC »

boneitis wrote: post #140
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.

Not related to the rest of the thread, but this popped up the other week and, honestly to my shock, worked well on my Pi3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441112 You may or may not get some latency with video. Seemed to vary for me.

I thought this was going to be about NymphCast, an open source alternative to chromecast

http://nyanko.ws/product_nymphcast.php

https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#199

Post by MayeulC »

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…

> 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.

Why wouldn'y you? That's what I do: I use the DHCP server (dnsmasq) that comes with pi-hole, with a few additional config files, and it works pretty well. It even grants leases faster than my router was (which has been an issue for radv packets & DNS).

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#200

Post by MayeulC »

scottlamb wrote: post #69
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…

> 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…

Pine64's offering is pretty good, and they are all-in into open source, although their boards might be a bit less competitive now that the RPi4 is out. the Rockpro64 for instance has a PCIe connector.

https://www.pine64.org/

https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/ http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=ROCKPro64

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