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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

#211

Post by m4rtink »

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…

Not just all that, but also hardware DRM (!!) on the camera module interface: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/10884725497159188...

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#212

Post by snvzz »

Rpi4 and still no usb version of bootloader. What am I missing?

    # rpi-eeprom-update
    BCM2711 detected
    BOOTLOADER: up-to-date
    CURRENT: Tue 10 Sep 2019 10:41:50 UTC (1568112110)
     LATEST: Tue 10 Sep 2019 10:41:50 UTC (1568112110)
    VL805: up-to-date
    CURRENT: 000137ab
     LATEST: 000137ab
I wish this was better documented.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#213

Post by imtringued »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #182
benn_88 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's true that Broadcom is the reason why most clones are not as good as the Raspberry Pi but it is not because of the boot code. It's because Broadcom has a custom graphics chip that has nothing in common with the official ARM GPUs. Any effort into open sourcing the very popular Raspberry Pi will not help open sourcing other boards that have the way more common Mali GPUs. Raspberry Pis are their own island so to speak.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#214

Post by del_operator »

Been using my Pi 4 8GB with K3s and found it to already be quite enjoyable. I’ve seen some odd things being new to the Pi. I started off with the full desktop raspberry os and saw my usb storage devices weren’t mounted when I did not connect my a monitor or set a default resolution in rasp config.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#215

Post by rwmj »

chaz6 wrote: post #205
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.

How do you handle persistent storage? I find it is often non-trivial to adapt an appliation-specific operating system to run via pxe boot.

No one in the thread has mentioned it yet, but NBD is also an option, either NBD root or NBD for particular filesystems. I've used it for managing Pis and a couple of SiFive boards. It has different trade-offs from NFS (not necessarily faster/slower/better/worse, depends on what you're doing).

For what I'm doing which is software builds I was able to write a specific NBD driver[1] for this task which has quite large performance gains, although there are trade-offs that only make sense for temporary build directories. I don't believe this is possible with NFS at all, or at least not without far more effort.

[1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/03/21/new-nbdkit-remote-tmpf...

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#216

Post by joezydeco »

sangnoir wrote: post #181
joezydeco wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tinkerer…

I don’t even address hobbyists. Let them do what they want.

I’m taking about the people I encounter that are trying to use an RPi as an off-the-shelf compute solution for a production device.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#217

Post by ehonda »

threentaway wrote: post #45
mmastrac wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using for a filesystem? NFS? My worry would be saturating the older 100Mbit connections when downloading things like docker images.

The Pi4 can do 300-350mbps, which is faster than most people's internet connection.

I can download large files from my pi at 900mb/s and upload around 800mb/s. The hard drives attached to the pie are formatted ext3. If you use an NTFS drive though, you will get speeds around what you are describing.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#218

Post by ruinevil »

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…

Eben Upton was a Broadcom engineer and executive. He basically used his contacts there to setup Raspberry Pi, and the relationship has continued ever since.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#219

Post by sippingjippers »

rwmj wrote: post #215
chaz6 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle persistent storage? I find it is often non-trivial to adapt an appliation-specific operating system to run via pxe boot.

No one in the thread has mentioned it yet, but NBD is also an option, either NBD root or NBD for particular filesystems. I've used it for managing Pis and a couple of SiFive boards. It has different trade-offs from NFS (not necessarily faster/slower/better/worse, depends on what you're doing). For what I'm doing which is software builds I was able to write a specific NBD driver[1] for this task which has quite large…

Probably the most important tradeoff between nbd/nfs is that NFS by virtue of supporting shared mutation, means client-side caching is either non-existent or barely useful

With NBD you're giving a filesystem driver exclusive access to a block device, the kernel knows the underlying isn't expected to change, so for example no round-trips are required to read or revalidate some cached data, and something like "find /" while slow to run the first time around, will likely be served from cache on a subsequent pass, and thus lightning fast

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#220

Post by rwmj »

sippingjippers wrote: post #219
rwmj wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one in the thread has mentioned it yet, but NBD is also an option, either NBD root or NBD for particular filesystems. I've used it for managing Pis and a couple of SiFive boards. It has different trade-offs from NFS (not necessarily faster/slower/better/worse, depends on what you're doing). For what I'm doing which is software builds I was able to write a specific NBD driver[1] for this task which has quite large…

Probably the most important tradeoff between nbd/nfs is that NFS by virtue of supporting shared mutation, means client-side caching is either non-existent or barely useful With NBD you're giving a filesystem driver exclusive access to a block device, the kernel knows the underlying isn't expected to change, so for example no round-trips are required to read or revalidate some cached data, and something like "find /"…

This is very true, but I think NFSv4 makes things a little better?
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