Raspberry Pi 4 USB booting update.

Posted by their engineer, on the RPi Forums.....

USB boot development is in progress. We do not have a schedule for it, nor a release date. It is not the highest priority task we have, but there again, we do have more than one engineer and are perfectly capable of working on more than one thing at a time. When it is ready it will be announced. Probably in HUGE FLASHING letters on the blog home page.

So after already waiting 9~10 months after its release for this, it still isn't working!!!

Fantastic - almost as good as some other vapourware we used to hear about...

You're venting, I take it? It seems the trick with the RazPi 4 is to get it booting AT ALL, imho.

Yeah, I'm a bit annoyed!

But even the EDID still doesn't work properly, my Eyoyo monitors were found no problem on the RPi3 series, but not with the RPi4.

The only thing it seems to work with is my Samsung 24" monitor, but it's not what I want, that's for my proper desktop computer.

Let me guess. I have a RazPi 4, and many of the files in mmcblk0p1 seem hardware specific. FPGAs needed a program, either internally stored or else fed through an external chip. That configures the silicon. The RazPi 4 is on an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), which kind of fixes the hardware in silicon, but they have their firmware there with a bit of control to avoid a hardware recall. They just may have built in some fpga to allow themselves a little wriggle room on the hardware.

Now they obviously see a potential path to booting from usb, but it obviously is extremely difficult or laborious. The real difficulty would be avoiding the sdcard for the initial firmware load. I can understand them doing it on future models (Rpi 4C) but if they chose this method of booting with no backup, they could be cornered. Frankly, if the hardware is set in silicon, they've laid out the guts of $20k, and have to fork out again, after retesting fairly thoroughly. They also have a wait of 3-6 months, usually. It also makes you more open to boot viruses, and requires educating a lot more people on their boot sequence. Then people will want a lot more clever options …… with no profit to be made from any of this.

I haven't looked at the 4, but I haven't even enabled USB booting on my pi3s. Hell it's that long since I booted (other than reboot command after a new kernel) it was a new feature back then.
Same for having a monitor plugged in - that was when I last broke one of the systems. What a PITA to find a screen and keyboard/mouse. That's what ssh was invented for.

I must be missing something here.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Linux - Embedded & Single-board computer> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Finally! Over a year late, there is a beta of USB3 booting on the RPi4B.

I got around to trying it today, (don't try upgrading the 64bit system, mine broke), so I just used a 32bit system.

Still having lots of trouble trying to get my Eyoyo monitors to be recognized properly, I'm having to use VGA safe mode with my RPi4.

It works with a HDD in an external housing, & so will work with a SSD too - but I couldn't get it to boot my USB3 pendrives.

So it looks like it is now usable, at last, as long as I use my XGA monitor.

This is the info that I used, only use it if you feel happy too, I take no responsibility for any problems that may arise.....

sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade sudo rpi-update sudo reboot sudo apt install rpi-eeprom sudo nano /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update replace critical by beta crtl-x and Y sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -f sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -f /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta/pieeprom-2020-05-15.bin you can check the bootloader version using: vcgencmd bootloader_version vcgencmd bootloader_config Check for BOOTORDER=0xF41. 4 is for booting from USB and 1 is booting from the sd card. copy all .elf and .dat files from our SD card into the boot directory of our new SSD

I have an Rpi 4 w/4G used as a multimedia box. It feeds hdmi to my tv, which prevents me having to use that disgraceful interface via remote control. I have 32 & 64 bit Raspbian on it, largely because of the ease of setup. Slack development is stuck using .txz copies of the X86 version and there's issues. Raspbian sets up the image, run the config program & you're done. Setup is very messy once you get past point & click, however. The 64bit doesn't have nano; it uses pico, which I only found

Glad you got usb booting; did you need the eeprom update for that? Can you get a choice of boot options? What does rpi-update update anyhow?

Yes, the eeprom was updated, & presumably other files in /boot, as I had to copy over those .dat & .elf files to make it work from the HDD.

My first try was with the 64bit system, but as I said, it didn't upgrade cleanly, & left me without a usable system. So I used a 32bit system to do the upgrade to USB3 booting.

I only use the one system, so don't know if you could use both - it's taken them a year to get this far, so I don't want to mess with something that's just about working.

Originally Posted by fatmac Yes, the eeprom was updated, & presumably other files in /boot, as I had to copy over those .dat & .elf files to make it work from the HDD. My first try was with the 64bit system, but as I said, it didn't upgrade cleanly, & left me without a usable system. So I used a 32bit system to do the upgrade to USB3 booting. I only use the one system, so don't know if you could use both - it's taken them a year to get this far, so I don't want to mess with something that's just about working.

Yes, the RazPi is a bitch to boot up. I think I wrote some summary of it herehttps://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-a-4175674200/ In particular the 'cmdline.txt' specifies kernel, rootfs, and System.map; to boot multiple OSes you need all of those to be variable. If you had to copy the existing system over and they're using fat32, that limits it big time.

The latest RaspiOS (Aug2020) arm64 seems to be working OK, (except EDID still not finding a lot of monitors), but the RPi4 will now work by setting up monitors in config.txt, (which failed to work the last time I tried).

I have an external SSD, an external HDD, & an external USB3 pendrive working with my RPi4B/4GB using an HDMI WXGA monitor, (1366x768).

I'm using,
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=39 (which actually gives 1280x760)
hdmi_drive=2 (which makes audio work)