The Boot Order of the Raspberry Pi Is Unusual

Postedabout 1 month agoActive30 days ago

0o_MrPatrick_o0

21 points

7 comments

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Raspberry PiBoot ProcessEmbedded Systems

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Discussion (7 comments)

Showing 18 comments

dmitrygr

about 1 month ago

3 replies

How can one "discover" something well documented in the datasheet, and on google https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=266130, https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry+pi+boot+chain

atoav

about 1 month ago

1 reply

[delayed]

Joker_vD

about 1 month ago

1 reply

It's everywhere. Just recently (a couple of months ago) on HN there was a story about an SQLite-but-rewritten-in-Rust [0], how they've discovered some peculiarity in SQLite file format by reading its source code. Except, of course, this peculiarity has been documented for decades, on SQLite's official site. How did they manage to write SQLite-compatible DBMS without reading the official documentation of the file format, I have no idea.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45059888

nineteen999

about 1 month ago

It does not bode well when you're writing a database engine and not revealing any bugs ... because all your test datasets are under 1GB.

JohnBooty

about 1 month ago

I don't think the author was presenting it like some kind of "new to the world" discovery. It was just something they recently learned.

yunohn

about 1 month ago

The blog post from OP is mostly AI generated - quite a few tells in the style of writing.

messe

about 1 month ago

3 replies

> This explains several Raspberry Pi oddities:

> The Raspberry Pi has No BIOS / UEFI

This isn't really that strange for an ARM SoC.

baobun

about 1 month ago

1 reply

Also, there is UEFI firmware for it.

https://0ink.net/posts/2024/2024-07-01-pi-uefi-boot.html

oddmiral

about 1 month ago

2 replies

Can this UEFI firmware be ported to other ARM devices, e.g. phones, tablets, books?

baobun

about 1 month ago

1 reply

Have you checked out uboot?

https://u-boot.org/

franga2000

about 1 month ago

1 reply

Doesn't everything under the sun boot with uboot? Uboot is usually what people want to replace when they say "why can't this just run UEFI?"

M95D

about 1 month ago

I have yet to find a valid reason for UEFI to replace u-boot, or UEFI to exist at all.

ChickeNES

about 1 month ago

Yes, it's just a port of the EDK2 UEFI reference firmware

hulitu

30 days ago

> This isn't really that strange for an ARM SoC.

When a lot of people call them "PC"s, it is.

joezydeco

about 1 month ago

I've worked on bootloaders for multiple ARM SoCs and each one has their own charms, their own quirks, and their own hair-pulling features. I wouldn't touch Broadcom parts with a ten-foot pole but, thankfully, they don't want to work with me either so we're cool.

TI and NXP are probably the better choices. 3358/Beagle still looks for a DOS-era Master Boot Record on flash when strapped the normal way, which is charming. Most allow for serial bootstrapping when nothing else is available, which is a lifesaver. I do wish more parts picked up the USB-UF2 bootloading method that Pico has created. THAT is awesome.

ValdikSS

about 1 month ago

1 reply

Well, "Traditional PC Boot" is also not like that on Intel, the booting is started from the chipset, from Intel ME. It boots the CPU.

ValdikSS

about 1 month ago

And on many other platforms the CPU also does not boot itself. Many SoCs have a small core which configures and boots all the other cores (usually Cortex-M or similar).

lproven

about 1 month ago

The firmware in question being Microsoft's ThreadX. This was made FOSS a few years back but that doesn't help with the Pi.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/28/microsoft_opens_sourc...

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