SBBR-compliant (UEFI+ACPI) AArch64 firmware for the Raspberry Pi 4
This is a pretty small update, mostly as a checkpoint to some internal refactoring happening.
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.8
What’s inside this release?
The matching Pi 3 release is https://github.com/pftf/RPi3/releases/tag/v1.21
As always, read the release notes and usual caveats.
I hadn’t even finished writing up the 1.6 related artifacts when Pete pushed the button on the new release. Huge thanks both to Pete for getting this out there so soon and to Ard Biesheuvel for reviewing and approving the edk2-platforms fixes.
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.7
What’s inside this release?
The ACPI fixes will mean improved hardware support in OSes, although today that mostly means improved NetBSD support. We definitely need some volunteers to help with enabling Pi 4 support with ACPI in upstream Linux – see the issue tracker.
Big shout-out to Jeremy Linton for the PPTT implementation (Processor Properties Topology Table) – a new ACPI 6.3 table describing the relation between CPUs and caches. Yes, that’s not a typo – our PPTT is the 2nd revision variant introduced in ACPI 6.3, whereas PPTT was first introduced in 6.2.
Note: the matching Pi 3 UEFI release (v1.19) combines the fixes for the Pi 4 v1.6 and v1.7 releases.
As always, read the release notes and usual caveats.
A few more goodies…
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.6
What’s inside this release?
Biggest change here is that your Pi will now boot at the default (Pi Foundation-recommended) frequency, instead of the 600MHz minimum. One less configuration option to change on every upgrade!
IMPORTANT: HTTP(S) boot, like PXE and iSCSI, will not currently work with the internal network card, because the GENET driver has not been upstreamed yet. This means you need a supported USB interface (Ax88772b) to use this feature.
As always, read the release notes and usual caveats.
Our UEFI firmware already supports certain USB-based network adapters for network booting (or other purposes), but that requires an additional adapter, which becomes even more awkward if you want to use a PoE HAT. NetBSD Arm platform guru Jared McNeill has been working on something, that Pi 4 UEFI users are going to find pretty cool. Dongle-less PXE and iSCSI is coming to a Pi 4 near you, because we’re getting native support for GENET networking soon! 😍🔥
This is being implemented as a Simple Network Protocol driver, so it will be usable by any UEFI driver or application.
A quick follow-up to v1.4, this release brings some important fixes.
Don’t stop me now (’cause I’m having a good time)
Queen – Jazz
Don’t stop me now (yes, I’m havin’ a good time)
I don’t want to stop at all
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.5
What’s inside this release?
This release mostly improves on the logic added to v1.4 release for switching between 3GB/4GB modes on the 4GB Pi 4.
The fix for external .dtb is worth diving into. Many of our readers will know, that Raspberries traditionally boot operating systems with Device Tree, instead of ACPI. A dated overview can be found on the official Pi site. Long story short, if you want to boot an 64-bit Linux, NetBSD or FreeBSD today on the Pi with full I/O support, you still need the Device Tree that the VPU firmware prepares based on your config.txt settings (dtparams, overlays, etc).
The Pi 4 support for Device Tree is exactly like the Pi 3 support. At the time, UEFI relied on the Device Tree being placed in RAM after the UEFI image itself, basically overlaying itself on a section of the UEFI image. Recently, new VideoCore firmware broke this approach (which I really shouldn’t have come up with in the first place!) by switching the load ordering – now the Device Tree was loaded before the UEFI image, and since the two images overlapped, the Device Tree blob was getting overwritten. You can read more about it here and here. Anyway, it’s fixed now. The same fix needs to be made to the Pi 3 build. That’s still TBD.
Be mindful that the fix involved changing the load address for the Device Tree in a way that wouldn’t overlap the UEFI image. The new values are:
While looking at the above regression, we were also able to regain 2MiB of memory, as the Trusted Firmware footprint for Pi 4 is much smaller than on the Pi 3.
As always, read the release notes and usual caveats.
Pete’s on a roll! Some significant improvements have landed in the latest and greatest release.
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.4
What’s inside this release?
Assuming you have a 4GiB Pi, you can now boot with with the entire 4GiB available if you run NetBSD-current (generic 64-bit image), which already supports the ACPI interfaces required to make the Pi USB3 controller work with the full 4GiB RAM. Those living on the edge can try this Linux patch.
Note: upstreaming the Linux patch would be a great way to help this project.
Additionally, there’s been some improvements to the setup option layout:
As always, read the release notes and usual caveats.
This is a minor follow-up to v1.2 for Pi 4, intended to do some soak testing on the ongoing ACPI clean-up and factorization changes.
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.3
What’s inside this release?
As always, read the release notes and usual caveats.
Hot on the heels of v1.1, Pete has a new release for you.
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.2
What’s inside this release?
It may not look like much, but it provides a radically improved networking experience, courtesy of a heads up by Jared and his recent work on the NetBSD GENET driver.
Of course what use is improved GENET via ACPI, when there is barely an OS support? Well, courtesy of the amazing work done by Pete and Jeremy Linton, the Linux ACPI patch for GENET has been merged into net-next.
As always, read the release notes and usual caveats.
Courtesy of Pete Batard, a new release is out. Again, this is very early in development, so the usual caveats apply – not all OSes will behave as expected and there’s not much yet in terms of step-by-step instructions.
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.1
What’s inside this release?
“GENET” refers to the on-board Gigabit Ethernet controller on the Raspberry Pi 4. The ACPI bindings for GENET will allow networking use under Linux. The upstream Linux enablement is still a work in progress, so see the relevant bcmgenet patches. For 5.x see https://lkml.kernel.org/lkml/?q=bcmgenet and for 4.19 see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=950578.