v1.5 release available

Posted on by Andrei Warkentin

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)
Don’t stop me now (yes, I’m havin’ a good time)
I don’t want to stop at all

Queen – Jazz

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.

Now, when you have 3GiB mode selected (which is the default), you will see 3GiB being reflected in the UEFI setup screen.

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.

If you want to boot an OS using Device Tree, don’t forget to enable it. By default the Pi 4 will boot in ACPI mode.

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:

  • device_tree_address=0x1f0000
  • device_tree_end=0x200000

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.

v1.4 release already out

Posted on by Andrei Warkentin 2 Comments

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:

Reorder forms in the order they are most likely to be queried.
Rename Chipset Configuration, making CPU settings more prominent.
New Advanced Configuration. 3GB limit setting is grayed out on 1GB/2GB boards.
Grouping all SD/MMC settings together.

As always, read the release notes and usual caveats.

v1.3 release

Posted on by Andrei Warkentin Leave a comment

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.

V1.2 RELEASE IS OUT!

Posted on by Andrei Warkentin 2 Comments

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.

v1.1 release is out!

Posted on by Andrei Warkentin 2 Comments

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.