Comment by stefan_
9 days ago
Good reminder that the Raspberry Pis only have good software support if you stick to whatever the foundation is releasing. Because that same foundation has stayed obsessed with their weird custom ways of doing things, instead of furthering efforts like UEFI on ARM. Some of it is insultingly stupid - like for revD of the 5, you better now update the magic boot partition of your RPi with the device tree overlay for revD, because it will use the old device tree, but also expect the overlay to be there so it can actually work. To say the least, that is never what overlays were supposed to be for.
> custom ways of doing things, instead of furthering efforts like UEFI on ARM.
I thought uBoot was more or less the standard way of booting embedded Linux? Is it really worth bringing the entire UEFI environment, which is basically a mini OS, to such devices? Embedded devices are often designed to handle power loss or even be unplugged by users, so the boot up process is generally as lean as possible.
U-Boot nowadays speaks UEFI :) (and so does LK)
New Android devices all use a UEFI bootloader: https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/bootloader...
SecureBoot might be more useful than UEFI on SBC like Pi.
The grub EFI shim is signed, but does or doesn't verify kernel image and initrd and module (and IDK optionally drive and CPU and RAM hw) signatures?
mokutil does module signature key enrollment. Kernel modules must be signed with a key enrolled in the BIOS otherwise they won't be loaded.
To implement SecureBoot without UEFI would be to develop an alternate bootloader verification system.
But what does grub or uboot or p-boot do after the signed grub shim is verified?
mokutil and these commands don't work without UEFI:
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This is exactly why I’ve to replaced my home server by a low-power x86 NUC instead. No custom build needed to run NixOS and idle power consumption turns out to be slightly lower than the Raspberry Pi 5.
Idle consumption is truly horrid on the Pi 5, even with all the hacks and turning absolutely everything off and hobbling the SoC to 500 Mhz it's imposible to get it under 2W. I'm convinced that the Pi Foundation doesn't think battery powered applications are like, a thing that physically exists.
Allow me to ask you what’s the NUC computer you are using?
I’m using an ASUS NUC 14 Essential Kit N355. It’s a bit more expensive than the Pi 5, but also more powerful (8 cores and decent GPU). There is also a more affordable N150 model. And even lower budget are the N150 mini PCs from Chinese manufacturers, but they often mess up things like cooling in a hardware revision (compared to the favorable review that you’d read).
And forgot to mention this before: Intel CPUs with built-in GPUs have very performant and energy efficient hardware video codecs, whereas the Raspberry Pi 5 is limited and lacks software support.
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I am not the OP, but I got an $150 (at a time) fanless quad core Celeron box at Aliexpress about 5 years ago, and it just runs with zero problems with openmediavault and dockers. Attached is external HDD over USB 3, it’s still fast enough (and the HDD is the bottleneck, not the USB interface).
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Could these choices have anything to with the alleged focus on Compute Module and less focus on the "normal" Raspberry? Does anyone know?
not really, it has been like that since day1. it has more to do with the weird architecture of the bcm chips they use.
When your SoC is a GPU with CPU cores tacked on, it's a bit weird to boot things up.
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It is acutely on point. The only reason people have to put in work again and again to fix distributions like Fedora for Raspberry Pi models is because the foundation pulls stunts like that revD. Right now, you can take Buildroot at git master, build an RPi image and have it randomly not work on one of two what looks like identical RPi 5 boards. That's bad, and there is no reason for it.
And you would solve this how?
Your comment only serves to illustrate exactly why big companies like BRCM are not seeing the case the way you do. Apple, if you want to start naming names puts out hardware that is far more closed than the Raspberry Pi foundation and yet you don't see the same level of aggression against Apple. What you do see is a couple of very talented hackers that won't take 'you can't' for an answer and that will RE stuff until they know enough to scratch their itch.
That's the way you solve these problems, not by writing take-downs.
Not having UEFI on ARM has never held me back. I do have a nice Apple laptop lying around here that is unusable because the network drivers need a functioning copy of Apple's OS on that machine to get bootstrapped. Rather than bitching at Apple about it I just stopped using and buying their products.
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Very sorry, but people are allowed to have opinions and to express them. If the opinions upset you, then don't read them - by your logic anyway.
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