This sounds pretty cool! Features like this really open up exciting ways to deploy RPis, even for DIY folks like me who use them to do things like control projectors in a theatre show.<p>But man oh man, this page is a striking reminder that GitHub could probably use finer grained controls for commenting on issues. I sympathize with the person who wanted to close the issue originally, it looks like it just became a magnet for "Are we there yet?" seat-kicking and "I prefer commenting to thumbs-upping" spam. If there isn't already, there should be a way to toggle a single issue so that anyone can react but only org members can comment.
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.
This is such a misleading title. 2 and 3 have had this for a while, one can do this with 4.<p>I'm currently using a recent MicroSD card on my Pi 4 though, haven't had any real issues with it.
Good timing! Only today I was following these instructions to install 64 bit Fedora on a RPi 4B, booting from a USB 3 drive:<p><a href="https://fwmotion.com/blog/operating-systems/2020-09-04-installing-fedora-server-onto-pi4/" rel="nofollow">https://fwmotion.com/blog/operating-systems/2020-09-04-insta...</a><p>(Unfortunately I didn't get to the end because my ancient spinning-rust USB drives take up a bit too much power to work reliably without a powered USB hub, so now I have to wait for some SSD-based USB drives to be delivered.)
From this page [1] on Raspberry Pi's Docs it seems like it's been like that for a while. Had there been a big change with this ROM specifically?<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md" rel="nofollow">https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...</a>
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.<p>What they should do is to leverage their position in the market and convince Broadcom to open source the bootloader and drivers. There are a bunch of binary blobs from Broadcom that are a mystery as to what they do. No docs, no anything. HAL layer is completely at the mercy of Raspbery Pi.<p>Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing.<p>If you want to support proper open source development (I understand, at some point things get proprietary the closer you get to the hardware, but with RPi, there isn't even a datasheet for the processor that you can get your hands on), buy Beagle board and other alternatives.
Oh man I feel for the maintainers here, with the many "this isn't the place for that" and now-deleted comments.<p>It's on my mind, as I just set up a vpn gateway on a Pi, and while I sorta want to document the process, I don't want to support randos.
As a pi noob: does this make it more reliable/feasible to use a pi to run a home server/application/etc? I've read in the past that SD cards aren't good with repeated read/writes, which makes it somewhat unreliable in the long run. If a pi is configured to run via USB, does that make it as reliable as other consumer hardware like a pc/laptop?
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.
Almost all of my SBCs run from USB storage, the performance improvements over SD card are obviously night and day; but I never had success with the direct boot from USB(official methods) and had to jump from SD card to USB storage after boot i.e. having only /boot on SD card. RPi 4 being newer, I assume it's designed with USB boot in mind and perhaps USB boot might work better than earlier iterations.
FYI the EEPROM page in the Raspberry Pi docs still says:<p>> USB boot support is currently being beta-tested. See
> the "USB mass storage boot" section of the Bootloader
> Configuration Page for further details.<p>But in general, it seems like it works without having to change your 'FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS' setting from 'critical' to 'stable' anymore.
Rpi4 and still no usb version of bootloader. What am I missing?<p><pre><code> # 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
</code></pre>
I wish this was better documented.
I wonder if this will help improve its status on <a href="https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers" rel="nofollow">https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers</a>, moving it out of the category of SBCs which have "fatal flaws"
It's nice but I'm honestly baffled that it's seen as such a big deal as it's pretty trivial to make grub boot off USB, leaving the SDcard only being used doing the initial boot.
Is it just about the convenience?