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

251–260 of 269 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#251

Post by ksaj »

joezydeco wrote: post #216
sangnoir wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm always amused and simultaneously annoyed by those ads about Raspberry Pi "killers" that are X amount faster or whatever, but they never get around to pointing out the price factor. They nearly always start at double the price. I'd only expect them to outperform the Raspberry Pi if they are double the price.

The Raspberry Pi is what it is, and is in every way brilliant for it. If you want X amount faster, you pay for that. That's not a Raspberry Pi killer. It's a different category altogether. Those SBCs cost more, and therefore you get more. If you need that, Raspberry Pi isn't what you need. But if you are within the group that Raspberry Pi caters to, it's hard to find better.

It's like saying the new electric Harley Davidson motorcycle is an e-bike killer. Of course it's faster and more powerful and has more this and that more features. It costs more. It's just not the same thing.

PS: The new Rpi 4 with lots of RAM is certainly getting there. I actually use one as my desktop even though I have far more powerful equipment in my studio.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#252

Post by glenneroo »

shakna wrote: post #120
paulmd wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can talk to managing Pis in an educational setting, and honestly, it is less bad than expected. (Disclaimer: No longer a school sysadmin. But was for a number of years.) First some comparisons. Kids are seriously rough on technology. We had a fleet of about three hundred laptops, two hundred iPads, and two hundred Pis in the junior school. In a year, we'd end up with about a hundred laptop screen replacements, two…

I've snapped/bent a few microSD cards myself trying to remove them from "exotic" cases, both times in hasty situations (interactive art shows). I've learned to slowly remove them while not exerting any vertical pressure when it's still halfway inside the Pi - just keep trying to slide the card out while using fingernails to catch the bump on the end.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#253

Post by shakna »

glenneroo wrote: post #252
shakna wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can talk to managing Pis in an educational setting, and honestly, it is less bad than expected. (Disclaimer: No longer a school sysadmin. But was for a number of years.) First some comparisons. Kids are seriously rough on technology. We had a fleet of about three hundred laptops, two hundred iPads, and two hundred Pis in the junior school. In a year, we'd end up with about a hundred laptop screen replacements, two…

I've snapped/bent a few microSD cards myself trying to remove them from "exotic" cases, both times in hasty situations (interactive art shows). I've learned to slowly remove them while not exerting any vertical pressure when it's still halfway inside the Pi - just keep trying to slide the card out while using fingernails to catch the bump on the end.

Ah, sorry. When I said "kids snapped theirs in half", I wasn't referring to the SD card. I was referring to the Pi itself. Kids can be monstrous when it comes to technology.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#254

Post by trashcan »

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

Raspberry Pis are actually very reliable if you don't use the cheapest possible power supply and SD card from Amazon. I have several that have years of uptime.

That said, I agree kids are rough on any technology.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#255

Post by gorgoiler »

michaelt wrote: post #192
gorgoiler wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lots of points you make are true. Yes, if you yank the plug without saving you lose your work. Or Exim will have to flush the queue again. Or vim will have a dangling swapfile that it will ask you about next time. Or you’ll have to start over on your game of solitaire.

And yes, SD cards have flaws.

My question was: if I turn my computer off every day by yanking the power cord, I expect nothing to break, so what am I missing when people seem so wary of doing it?

(Recall that this was all in the context of a parent comment lamenting a lack of a dedicated shutdown button on the RPi.)

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#256

Post by sgt »

stedaniels wrote: post #176
mikorym wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That server should be on a UPS. Some people like to use an old laptop as a server at home, and that's even more ideal as it has a built in battery, often allowing the machine to stay alive for an hour or so before dying.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#257

Post by tinus_hn »

jcims wrote: post #156
LeoPanthera wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know for a start Microsoft made some ‘updates to the standards’ when they found out tftp isn’t really suitable for fetching gigabyte size images.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#258

Post by tinus_hn »

trashcan wrote: post #254
paulmd wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Raspberry Pis are actually very reliable if you don't use the cheapest possible power supply and SD card from Amazon. I have several that have years of uptime. That said, I agree kids are rough on any technology.

Actually the problem is with unexpected shutdowns so logically if you’re having years of uptime you wouldn’t be seeing these issues.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#259

Post by varispeed »

0xCMP wrote: post #232
varispeed wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly does it help IT education and what was wrong with it that it needed a "reboot"?

The original idea was giving kids a device they could just connect into a TV (no need to buy a new screen) and learn by screwing up like ~"we all did when computers were simpler." iPads, iPhones, Windows, etc. They're expensive and complicated. Kids can't take the family computer and screw up installing linux 3 times while Mom needs to do something for work. A $25 computer is something a family could easily afford an…

We had computers at school, but we didn't have great teachers. Wouldn't be better if school spent money on good specialists willing to share their knowledge or at least make sure kids watch certain channels on YouTube that have wealth of knowledge? If parents won't spend $200 on a computer to help their children get better future, their certainly won't spend $25. I bet they wouldn't even treat this seriously.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

#260

Post by qubex »

shakna wrote: post #120
paulmd wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can talk to managing Pis in an educational setting, and honestly, it is less bad than expected. (Disclaimer: No longer a school sysadmin. But was for a number of years.) First some comparisons. Kids are seriously rough on technology. We had a fleet of about three hundred laptops, two hundred iPads, and two hundred Pis in the junior school. In a year, we'd end up with about a hundred laptop screen replacements, two…

How on earth do you get a “hard-drive failure” on an iPad?!
Post reply on HN