Raspberry Pi 4 big EEPROM update. improved USB Boot and much more.
should be the same for Pi 400 (mine is on order)
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instructions **At your own risk this is a beta update**
Using Raspberry Pi OS 32bit
eeprom update
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
reboot
sudo nano /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update
critica stable beta
sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -f /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta/pieeprom-2020-10-28.bin
reboot
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Raspberry Pi4 bootloader EEPROM release notes
USB MSD boot also requires the firmware from Raspberry Pi OS 2020-08-20 or newer. https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md
2020-10-28 Defer HDMI diagnostics display, update-timestamps, tryboot support
Skip rendering of the diagnostics screen for HDMI_DELAY seconds (default 5). This means that for SD-card and USB MSD flash boot devices the diagnostics screen will not be visible.
On Pi 4B 1.4 (8GB) initialise SDRAM whilst waiting for the USB port power off time. This makes booting slightly faster.
Remove HDMI console messages where the information is duplicated elsewhere on the display.
Improve compatiblity with external USB 3.0 disk enclosures by enumerating the downstream hubs before executing the USB port power off. N.B. Pi4 8GB automatically powers off the USB ports during chip-reset and does not need this change.
Don’t timeout a USB MSD device after USB_MSD_LUN_TIMEOUT if there are no other MSD devices or LUNs to tries. This avoids unecessary timeouts on very slow to initialise disk drives e.g. USB HDDs designed for backups.
Fix failover to partition zero if the partition number is invalid. For USB MSD boot a start.elf update is also required.
SD-Card – Change default retries from 0 to 1 to improve reliability with some old SD v1 cards.
Fix issue where boot would stop if partition type 0x83 was encountered before the first FAT partition.
SELF_UPDATE mode (Network, USB MSD boot) now reads the timestamp information in pieeprom.sig created by rpi-eeprom-update to see if the updated is newer than the current ‘update-timestamp’. If not, the update is skipped to avoid stale updates on network or USB disks being installed by accident.
recovery.bin updates (from the SD card) do not check the timestamp because recovery.bin renames itself once the update is completed. However, it still writes the update-timestamp to the EEPROM.
The update-timestamp is the timestamp when the update is created is independent of the build-timestamp for the bootloader executable. See rpi-eeprom-udpate -h
Add support for the ‘tryboot’ feature that enables operating systems to implement a fallback mechanism if an OS upgrade fails. This works with all bootable media types but requires updated firmware and OS software.
This feature should be viewed as EXPERIMENTAL and may change depenending upon feedback from other OS/distro maintainer. https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/commit/757666748ebf69dc161a262faa3717a14d68e5aa
