← Back to context

Comment by JdeBP

6 days ago

Whilst the headlined article is interesting, it's a case of the new and shiny distracting from regressions in what already exists.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is lacking in some fairly basic support that the Pi 4 has. There's no TianoCore, no NetBSD, no FreeBSD, no OpenBSD, no OmniOS(CE) … in fact nothing at all apart from Raspberry Pi OS. A couple of of the operating systems seem to point the finger at poorly documented hardware changes that the manufacturer has been no help with.

* https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Plat...

* https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/#index6h2

* https://www.freebsd.org/where/#download

* https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

* https://downloads.omnios.org/media/braich/

So the question that comes to my mind is whether this is yet further new and different Raspberry Pi 5 hardware that comes with no software or prospect of software.

39 comments

JdeBP

Reply
zamadatix  2 days ago

> in fact nothing at all apart from Raspberry Pi OS

How do you figure? E.g. OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Alpine Linux, Kali, and Zephyr all offer official image support. Others have unofficial support, e.g. I think FreeBSD actually falls in this boat.

  • avgeek23  2 days ago

    A lot of linux native software example redshift still does not work on the rpi. Lot of things are broken. Recently i tried to use it as a basic desktop replacement until my new laptop arrives. Does a terrible f job.

    A 10 year old celeron n2930 based mini pc i purchased for 30$ at a scrapper performs way better than the pi4. Ran esxi and bunch of vms on top of it aswell. Sips 10 w of power.

    • zamadatix  2 days ago

      I tend to prefer small x86 boxes myself but the discussion here was supposed regressions on the Pi 5's ability to run anything but the official OS, not general dislikes. Similarly, I think the Redshift thing is actually an X11/Wayland debate.

      1 reply →

    • peterfirefly  2 days ago

      I used my RP5 as my main machine for the better part of a month. It worked surprisingly well, even with just an SD card.

denkmoon  2 days ago

What does tianocore do for raspberry pi? is it just a shim to add uefi?

  • MrDOS  2 days ago

    Yes; it means you can, for example, install an off-the-shelf copy of Debian. See https://github.com/pftf/RPi4.

    In theory, it's a wonderful idea, because it means you can run the same distro on your RPis as on the rest of your fleet (architecture differences notwithstanding), and therefore have consistent patching requirements, etc. In practice, as frustrating as it is that the RPi kernel patches haven't been upstreamed, they exist for a reason and I think by not having them, you're shooting yourself in the foot (even if you only hit a toe or two). Two things I observed recently when directly comparing stock Debian aarch64 with Raspberry Pi OS on an RPi4 was a 40%+ reduction in SD card read performance, and nonfunctional power control of the USB ports.

    Fwiw I still have a “poor man's NAS” RPi4 running Debian, and it works great. (The SD card throughput deficiencies don't affect me there because the system boots from a USB-attached SSD.) If you're able to take the time to make a situation-specific assessment of what works (and what works “well enough”) vs. what doesn't, then in the long term, you can reap the benefits of not having to remember how to handle a single oddball OS in your fleet (especially given RPi OS' particularly consumer-oriented whims).

  • JdeBP  2 days ago

    Yes, it is. And that in turn enables fairly simple installation of NetBSD and suchlike, which have ARM ports that know how to talk to and layer themselves on top of EFI firmware.

    An interesting further little feature of TianoCore particularly for Pi 4 users is that it maintains a fake hardware clock. It only ticks forward when the firmware is in boot services mode; it is persisted to the firmware's own image file in the EFI System Partition; and it isn't as effective as even a simple fake-hwclock utility. But it does satisfy the operating systems that assume that there must be a hardware clock, because every computer is PC98-compatible.

DHowett  2 days ago

I’ve noticed most of the replies to your comment address the first half, and none (as of right now) address the second:

> So the question that comes to my mind is whether this is yet further new and different Raspberry Pi 5 hardware that comes with no software or prospect of software.

If by “this” you mean the MicroSD Express hat from the article: this is a hobby project produced by a hobbyist, who seems to have no plans to sell or mass produce it.

It is unfair to the creator for you to lump it in with, and draw a conclusion from, the works produced by Raspberry Pi Holdings.

jojobas  2 days ago

RPi dropped the ball relative to the competition. Orange Pi boards outperform them for a fraction of the price. There are very few use-cases where Raspberry is preferable.

  • consumer451  2 days ago

    I just googled Orange Pi, tried to click on the first result, which is their website. But they have no https site set up, so I got no host. Http works but only on iOS safari, that's a bit weird. Is this CN net weirdness?

  • random_is_rando  2 days ago

    Support is everything for these boards. At least that's the way I see it. I looked into replacing my rpi4 with some other manufacturer but I see a lot of issues with support, mainly older kernels work, some even have some obscure builds that you have to download from some forums. Where my 4 still works fine on latest kernel. Even my rpi2 if I'm not mistaken, though didn't try it lately.

  • ThatPlayer  2 days ago

    I think the RPi 4 is still competitive. At ~40$, Orange Pi's boards are Allwinner H618 and Rockchip RK3566 based boards. I do have an Orange Pi 3B in use because it has an nvme port, but the RPi 4 is generally faster.

    The Raspberry Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5 are just too expensive. I do have some of the Pi 5s from both these companies, but have replaced them with Intel N100 mini-PCs instead. But I'll still use RPi 4's for my 3d printers and other lower-end uses.

    And RPi's software support is just better: I've got an Orange Pi 4. Orange Pi hasn't updated their OS for it in years. Last time I tried to get it working in Armbian, HDMI output was (is?) broken: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26818-opi-4-lts-no-hdmi-outp...

jamesy0ung  2 days ago

Raspbian works perfectly fine. Most of those other operating systems don’t really have the best GPIO support which is where Raspberry Pi shines. I’d just get a cheap mini pc if I wanted to run something else.

  • franga2000  2 days ago

    Except the RPi is smaller, lighter, lower power and more efficient than most mini PCs. It also has a bunch of unique addon boards, many (most?) of which don't really use GPIOs, but a standard communication interface like PCIe/USB/serial/SPI/I2C.

    No mini PC can beat most things about the Pi, apart from performance and compatibility, the latter of which is fully the fault of the manufacturer.

    • avgeek23  2 days ago

      An arduino board with a esp32 added to it can do a lot of things(minus some cam/image recognition stuff) for half the price.

      Rpi is strictly suited to very specific use cases.

      2 replies →

bsder  2 days ago

> A couple of of the operating systems seem to point the finger at poorly documented hardware changes that the manufacturer has been no help with.

If only we could have somehow predicted this. I mean who could have predicted that a company that has never released hardware documentation and screwed over individual users in preference to corporate users during shortages would get in the way of porting other OSes. <shocked Pikachu face>

I mean, it's not like people have been bitching about this for more than a goddamn decade.

If only we could have forseen this <rolls eyes>.

An RPI5 4GB is exactly the same price and form factor as the Beagle Y-AI. You can help the folks trying to do this right or not. The choice is yours.