[HN Gopher] The Raspberry Pi can boot off NVMe SSDs now
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The Raspberry Pi can boot off NVMe SSDs now
        
       Author : geerlingguy
       Score  : 194 points
       Date   : 2021-03-23 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
        
       | gkfasdfasdf wrote:
       | Can somebody please just make a NUC-type device that I can
       | purchase as a unit with the following included:
       | Rasberry PI 8GB + WiFi + Bluetooth       NVMe >= 128gb
       | Power supply appropriate for PI+NVMe (3.5A perhaps?)       Case
       | with appropriate cooling       Ubuntu >= 20.04
       | 
       | I would pay up to $200 USD for such a product. Why not an intel
       | NUC? Because I want to leave this on 24/7 and run various cron
       | jobs etc, so I want the low-power ARM chip.
       | 
       | Yes I can build it myself, but shopping for, gathering all the
       | parts etc is time consuming and I'd rather be writing my apps etc
       | to run on the device instead...
       | 
       | EDIT: formatting
        
         | CrazyPyroLinux wrote:
         | I've never been very moved by the pi line for "non-maker"
         | "server-type" stuff. Personally, I run a 4GB RockPro64 [0] in
         | the NAS case [1]. Add a heatsink [2] and a beefier 5A power
         | supply [3] just in case I ever want to add spinning drives. But
         | for now I just use an NVMe adapter [4]. That's $148 total.
         | 
         | For $15 you can add Bluetooth and Wifi [5] if you really want.
         | Instead I chose to treat myself to $21-$40 worth of eMMC5
         | storage for the OS [6].
         | 
         | [0] $80 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-4gb-single-board-
         | comput... [1] $45 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-metal-
         | desktop-nas-casin... [2] $4
         | https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-30mm-tall-profile-heats...
         | [3] $13 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-12v-5a-us-power-
         | supply/... [4] $6 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-pci-
         | e-x4-to-m-2-ngff-nv... [5] $15
         | https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-1x1-dual-band-wifi-802-...
         | [6] https://pine64.com/product/16gb-emmc-module/?v=0446c16e2e66
        
           | gkfasdfasdf wrote:
           | Wow this is eye opening. I appreciate the links, I will look
           | into this!
        
           | jjoonathan wrote:
           | > I've never been very moved by the pi line for "non-maker"
           | "server-type" stuff.
           | 
           | I love raspberry pis but pi-mania is absolutely out of
           | control. I can't count how many $100+ programmer hours I have
           | seen wasted waiting for a $10 pi to boot, build, or generally
           | stop being slow. I have witnessed the deep shame of a multi-
           | million dollar exhibition center-featuring a RPi kiosk
           | deployed in front of customers that chugs so hard the sales
           | team takes shifts intercepting people before they can poke at
           | it and realize how much of a dog it is. But at least they
           | saved $200 on not using a laptop, right?
           | 
           | If you want to dip your toes in the hardware world from the
           | comfort of ubuntu at impulse buy prices, pis are great, but
           | they stop making sense very quickly once you exit that
           | specialized vertical.
        
             | tyingq wrote:
             | Phoronix did a reasonable comparison of an Rpi4 to a
             | Celeron G5900 and it does a pretty good job of showing why
             | a Pi isn't a great (even low end) general purpose option.
             | Not disputing it's usefulness in other spaces...
             | 
             | https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspber
             | r...
        
         | tinco wrote:
         | Did you seriously just state that you'd pay $200 for $250 worth
         | of parts? And you want someone to design and integrate them for
         | you on top of that?
         | 
         | edit: Ok sorry, apparently I miscalculated and it's actually
         | possible to build this for less than $200.
        
           | hobofan wrote:
           | How do you get to $250? 256GB NVMe runs for about $50 and a
           | PI 8GB + peripherals for ~$100.
        
           | satysin wrote:
           | How did you get to $250 worth of parts?
           | 
           | 8GB Pi4 is $75
           | 
           | 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD is ~$40
           | 
           | cases with a fan are ~$25
           | 
           | power supply is like $10 but let's say $20
           | 
           | That brings us to $160 give or take. Where is the extra $90
           | going?
           | 
           | I think $200 is doable with a healthy profit margin.
        
             | tinco wrote:
             | Woops, for some reason my first google result for the SSD
             | was wildly overpriced.
        
         | numpad0 wrote:
         | > low-power
         | 
         | > NVMe
         | 
         | pick one
        
         | randomstring wrote:
         | Why doesn't an Argon ONE M.2 Case not fit your requirements?
         | https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-m-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-...
         | 
         | Or is it about having it all pre-built and pre-installed?
        
           | gkfasdfasdf wrote:
           | This case looks awesome! But yeah ideally it would be pre-
           | built and pre-installed, with NVMe installed internally.
        
         | derefr wrote:
         | Aren't most NASes ARM-based? While they don't usually support
         | NVMe, they _do_ support SATA SSDs (which would max out at the
         | same speed the Pi's single-PCIe-lane NVMe gets you.)
         | 
         | Usually NASes are thought of as not too power efficient; but
         | that's because of the HDDs in them. Remove the spinning rust,
         | remove the problem.
        
           | btgeekboy wrote:
           | Agree. Lots of Synology/QNAP devices out there that are
           | designed to be a NAS in form factor but also support things
           | like VMs, containers, and the like. Some of them even do
           | support NVM.
        
           | Wohlf wrote:
           | Depends, most I've seen are low power Intel but the power
           | consumption should be roughly the same.
        
         | rancor wrote:
         | Look into Serve The Home's Project TinyMiniMicro:
         | https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
         | 
         | If you're not too picky about specs, eBay will give you one of
         | these nodes for around $200, although you might have to supply
         | the NVMe.
        
         | TaylorAlexander wrote:
         | Just need a case for the Tofu:
         | 
         | https://youtu.be/m-QSQ24_8LY
         | 
         | Idk about Ubuntu though. Raspberry Pi OS is based off of Debian
         | and optimized for the pi.
         | 
         | Edit: Ah I was unfamiliar but of course there is an Ubuntu
         | release for the pi. https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi
         | 
         | Edit2: Ah I jumped straight to the Tofu board but I didn't see
         | that TFA features another nice board for this purpose.
        
           | gkfasdfasdf wrote:
           | In my experience Rasbian packages are very old, makes certain
           | dev tasks harder.
        
             | TaylorAlexander wrote:
             | Yep that's fair. I had that trouble with Debian on my own
             | systems and I tend to use Ubuntu on them now.
        
         | gambiting wrote:
         | >>Because I want to leave this on 24/7 and run various cron
         | jobs etc, so I want the low-power ARM chip.
         | 
         | But the Pi4 can use as much as 15W, it has left the realm of
         | "low powered" devices long time ago.
         | 
         | I have a very old(2013) HP workstation that I use as a NAS,
         | with a 2nd gen i5, and when running it uses 20W of power,
         | measured by myself.
        
           | geerlingguy wrote:
           | It can use as much as 15W under heavy load, but most of my Pi
           | 4-based projects seem to idle around 3-5W.
        
           | bredren wrote:
           | The author discusses power requirements / power supply
           | considerations of pi 4 + nvme at 6:44:
           | 
           | https://youtu.be/4Womn10v71s
        
           | sitzkrieg wrote:
           | its worth noting raspberry pis have no real power management
           | too. i mean the cpu governors can down clock saving bulk of
           | energy, but you cannot turn off cores
        
           | Decabytes wrote:
           | In the video linked below at 6:55 he says the PI can consume
           | up to 10 watts at peak. Referencing the Raspberry pi
           | documentation^1 it says that the PI 4 consumes 600mA of power
           | at typical bare board consumption. Looking at intel Ark^2 for
           | a i5 sandy bridge shows a TDP of 95W. So it has the
           | capability of pulling far more watts. Sure the Intel computer
           | is much more powerful than the PI 4, but just as your
           | computer is only using 20 watts of power in a NAS setting,
           | the pi will probably be pulling far less than 10watts,
           | especially when idling. So while not the lowest power you can
           | get, still an incredible amount ratio for performance to
           | power. I suspect that for a pi4 running 24/7 with cron jobs,
           | the wattage will be far lower than what an older intel CPU
           | would pull, but this is just a theory, I'd have to have the
           | parts myself to test it out
           | 
           | 1.https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberr
           | y... 2. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/
           | 52207/i...
        
           | syntaxing wrote:
           | Hmm that's really really surprising if thats the case.
           | According to the spec sheet [1], its TDP is 95W. RAM itself
           | is 3W each, the cooling fans is easily 5W, the CPU cooling
           | fan should be another 10W-20W. Would love to learn the
           | configuration that gives you 20W power usage total. To put
           | into perspective, my mac M1 uses 20Wish normally for regular
           | usage.
           | 
           | [1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/5220
           | 7/i...
        
             | MrFoof wrote:
             | I just got a "1 Liter Form Factor" HP DeskPro 405 G6 Mini
             | that measures about 175x175x35mm (7x7x1.4 inches). AMD
             | Ryzen 7 4750GE PRO (Zen 2) that has a base 3.1GHz clock for
             | eight cores (4.3GHz all boost) which is an APU with eight
             | Radeon GPU cores, in which I DIY added in 64GB of memory,
             | and a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro.
             | 
             | With the Intel AX200 WiFi 6 and BT 5.0 disabled, it idles
             | at barely 12W. Running a bunch of virtualized loads
             | (nothing crazy) in XCP-NG, it's consistently under 20W
             | despite no matter what's running on it. If I had it going
             | flat out (with a 5GbE NIC plugged in via USB Type-C) under
             | something like heavy video rendering (CPU+GPU+storage)
             | loads it peaks at about 48-50W.
             | 
             | We're entering an era of pretty fantastic power
             | consumption, especially if you shy further away from Intel
             | SKUs at the moment. The Intel SKUs are pretty frugal, but
             | the AMD ones genuinely sip power and are only getting
             | better.
        
             | gambiting wrote:
             | I run ThrottleStop on windows with everything set to
             | minimum, so the CPU is pretty much running locked to 800mhz
             | - absolutely enough for a NAS.
        
             | WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
             | > its TDP is 95W
             | 
             | So AMD and Intel measure TDP differently because obviously
             | they do.
             | 
             | Intel's TDP is based on the max the CPU can generate while
             | AMD is based on what an average user would encounter.
        
               | wtallis wrote:
               | Intel's TDP is more based on the max the CPU would draw,
               | when all the various Turbo modes are disabled. Which
               | reflects approximately zero real-world deployments except
               | for the very low-end parts where Intel disables the Turbo
               | modes for product segmentation.
        
               | reitzensteinm wrote:
               | You've got it the wrong way around there. AMD is much
               | more conservative.
               | 
               | https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319402-intels-
               | desktop-...
               | 
               | "It's easy to see why Intel hasn't changed the way it
               | defines or communicates TDP to its customers: It would
               | make the company's high end look vastly worse compared
               | with AMD. A Core i9-10850K will draw up to 265W. If you
               | want an AMD CPU with that kind of power budget you have
               | to buy a Threadripper."
        
             | numpad0 wrote:
             | [1]
             | 
             | TDP is worst case sustained heat output for selecting
             | heatsinks, not representative of typical consumption at
             | all. Typical CPU fans are also like 12V/0.25A max with
             | power variable between 50 to 100% or so. 20W idle is thus
             | very believable for a build by a sane person[2].
             | 
             | 1: https://www.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2017/CPUs/tr-19
             | 50x/...
             | 
             | 2: Personally I often end up with more substantial
             | configurations like 12V/1.5A 80mm with couple 12V/1A as
             | sides but my suspicion is my lack of sanity is a huge
             | contributor to that
        
         | m463 wrote:
         | Just get a low-end intel box that is not a nuc. It doesn't have
         | to be a nuc, try one of the zotac fanless machines, which is
         | low power because of thermals.
         | 
         | I think once AMD spools up with 7nm we'll have machines like
         | this with even lower power.
        
         | rasz wrote:
         | ask friends/coworkers about laptops with cracked screens
        
         | corebuffer wrote:
         | Have you considered recycling a thin client?
         | 
         | This website gather specs on them and you can find used ones as
         | low as 20 bucks on eBay. Many will draw 10-20 watts, like a
         | Raspberry.
         | 
         | https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t510/
        
           | puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
           | Both my HP t520 and Fujitsu Futro S720 idle at 6W (with the
           | audio codec powered down), measured at the wall.
        
           | blacksmith_tb wrote:
           | Or quite a few Chromeboxes can be wiped and run Linux (though
           | it's worth doing a little homework, some at least need to be
           | popped open to have their dev-mode screw pulled like
           | this[1]). Certainly options for less than $100 on eBay.
           | 
           | 1: https://dareneiri.github.io/Asus-Chromebox-With-Full-
           | Linux-I...
        
         | stefan_ wrote:
         | The joke with the Raspberry Pi is that it is 1) so cheap
         | because its manufactured on an old silicon node but of course
         | that implies 2) it actually uses a ton of power compared to a
         | chip made in 7nm.
         | 
         | From what I could find the RPi chips are made in 27nm, and
         | while you can't exactly linearly extrapolate from that, I
         | wouldn't be surprised to find that a 7nm smartphone chip can
         | get you the same performance as the RPi at 1/3rd the power
         | consumption.
        
         | blinkingled wrote:
         | My Asus PN50 w/R7-4800U gets me 8C/16T for 10W, NVME SSD and
         | SATA SSD - no noise most of the time, very faint fan noise
         | under load. Even suspends / resumes well under Linux - coupled
         | with Wake on Lan - it's close to Pi level power usage and
         | acoustics.
        
           | zokier wrote:
           | Costs fair bit more than $200 though?
        
             | blinkingled wrote:
             | You can get a 4C one for $329 w/o memory and disks - not
             | cheap but I was merely trying to point out that x86 can do
             | low power with great performance now a days.
        
         | eli wrote:
         | For a similar use case I ended up with a Lenovo "nano" desktop.
         | The IoT models are designed to be run continuously and, uh, it
         | runs Windows too which I guess is a bonus. $300+ on sale.
        
           | sigjuice wrote:
           | These look really cool. Unfortunately, I can't seem to
           | configure one without Windows.
        
             | offtop5 wrote:
             | It should be a nominal task to install Ubuntu on top of it,
             | worst comes to worse it doesn't work and you send it back
             | to Best buy.
        
               | eli wrote:
               | It definitely works with Ubuntu
        
               | sigjuice wrote:
               | I am not concerned about the effort of installing Ubuntu.
               | I prefer to not pay the extra money for Windows, however
               | little it might be. I already have other Windows
               | computers.
        
               | offtop5 wrote:
               | Is this a moral argument, it would cost you more to find
               | a specific Linux laptop in most cases.
        
         | systemvoltage wrote:
         | You can buy Intel NUC that does way more than wimpy RPI.
         | Remember, RPI is _not opensource_ which is how most people see
         | them as - aka, a feel good company. It is as proprietary as
         | Intel in the critical areas (processor, sdk and bunch of binary
         | blobs).
         | 
         | RPI really doesn't belong in this type of a device you're
         | describing.
        
           | gkfasdfasdf wrote:
           | In my case being open source is a bonus - what I want is an
           | on-premise modern linux environment that is economical to
           | leave running 24/7, executes reasonably fast (including disk
           | IO), and secure (auto update etc).
        
           | mixmastamyk wrote:
           | What would?
        
             | mPReDiToR wrote:
             | PinePhone.
             | 
             | https://pine64.org
             | 
             | New batch due soon.
        
               | CrazyPyroLinux wrote:
               | Upvote for the interesting idea (fellow PinePhone user),
               | but see my other comment - The RockPro64 (also from
               | Pine64) is probably a better fit since it's a SBC with
               | PCIe and thus the ability to plug in NVMe which the OP
               | was asking for.
        
         | randy408 wrote:
         | The RPi 400 only has 4GB but the board is integrated into a
         | keyboard with a power button and a big heatsink, if you go for
         | a (m)SATA SSD + USB3 adapter you still have a second USB3 port,
         | those things can easily push 300MB/s with UASP, the official
         | power supply should be enough in this case.
        
         | znpy wrote:
         | Just buy a NUC. I just bought a nuc, 2nd hand off eBay, the CPU
         | supposedly has a 5W TDP... Adding a disk (WD Green?) it's
         | probably going to stay below 10W
        
           | open-paren wrote:
           | I've been looking at NUCs recently, but I can't decide how
           | much compute power I should aim for. What NUC did you buy?
        
         | Black101 wrote:
         | Those are pretty nice: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-
         | ryzen-4000-powered-asu...
        
         | nextos wrote:
         | Intel NUCs are IMHO exceptionally nice and fit your
         | requirements, with some little caveats. Besides, it's a much
         | more powerful machine and it will be easier to run till ARM
         | becomes more popular. With some tweaks, in my experience it can
         | use 3-4 W, so it might be able to replace a Pi in some
         | scenarios.
         | 
         | You might go slightly over budget with an i3 (unless you shop
         | for a deal). You need to install a NVMe yourself, as well as
         | RAM. The i3 can be run in a silent mode, but there are some
         | third party cases around which let you go fanless. I don't
         | understand why Intel is not selling a fanless NUC with an i3 /
         | m3. There's a lot of potential. Same for AMD.
        
       | imwillofficial wrote:
       | RPi is becoming more and more valuable with each passing year. We
       | live in such wonderful times to have access to such exciting
       | technology.
        
       | pytlicek wrote:
       | Awesome news! Can't wait to test it out :)
        
       | rsync wrote:
       | I have been following all of these jeffgeerling.com posts - very
       | interesting and informative and I appreciate all of this work he
       | is doing.
       | 
       | However, I continue to be frustrated in _actually procuring a
       | compute module 4_ of my own.
       | 
       | All of the suppliers are either out of stock or require an order
       | of 200+. I recently placed an order for 2x CM4008032 from Digi-
       | Key but it is on back order and who knows when it will actually
       | ship.
       | 
       | Am I the only one having these problems procuring CM4 ?
        
         | geerlingguy wrote:
         | I was able to get one 1GB RAM / 32GB eMMC (no wireless) module
         | last week at Micro Center.
         | 
         | And there are a few online retailers with such combos
         | available, but only 1GB RAM.
         | 
         | I have had two open orders for 4 GB CM4 Lite modules (I like
         | the Lite model because I don't need the eMMC for most projects)
         | since October / launch day :(
        
         | adolph wrote:
         | If you have a local MicroCenter they often have rare-ish units.
         | My local store has 1/32s in stock:
         | 
         | https://www.microcenter.com/product/631005/mcm-electronics-r...
        
       | LeoPanthera wrote:
       | The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. Not what most people think of
       | as "The Raspberry Pi".
        
       | moondev wrote:
       | Awesome post Jeff - very interesting and informative as always.
       | Appreciate your continued "guinea pig" role testing all these
       | hardware combinations and sharing your results with the
       | community. Cheers!
        
       | dsm9000 wrote:
       | I use my cluster of rpis to run light compute jobs so I prefer to
       | run everything in RAM using alpine Linux. I don't need to have
       | sdcard or nvme adding extra cost. NFS for persistence and cheap
       | independent wall warts plugged into a couple power strips.
       | However I guess if you need the IOPS maybe the nvme is called for
       | and worth the extra cost.
        
       | thetinguy wrote:
       | Can you add a usb 3 boot drive to your benchmarks?
        
         | _joel wrote:
         | It's in the video, 10% quicker boot of Chromium vs. via USB3
         | and much faster file copy
        
         | cosmotic wrote:
         | Preferably all 3: USB3 bridged NVMe, USB3 bridged SATA, and
         | USB3 flash
        
           | geerlingguy wrote:
           | I've done all three a number of times... just never
           | synthesized all the results.
           | 
           | I did update the post with a benchmark I forgot to include--
           | NVMe direct is 10% faster than the NVMe-to-USB 3.0-to-Pi
           | adapter, so there is definite and easily-measurable overhead
           | loss in the protocol translations.
           | 
           | Plus the potential (I don't know... but some people say it
           | could happen) for different weird issues to present
           | themselves when going from PCI to USB to PCI again.
        
       | LockAndLol wrote:
       | Why does it still take 7s to boot? I seem to remember a video of
       | the librem5 booting faster than that. Is that possible?
        
         | geerlingguy wrote:
         | I could optimize the boot process further, but this is stock Pi
         | OS.
        
       | 01100011 wrote:
       | For me, the increased perf is nice, but what I really want is
       | increased longevity. IME, microSD is a poor fit for hosting a R/W
       | filesystem. Every time my Pi based systems have gone down, it's
       | due to a faulty microSD. I was using well rated microSD cards and
       | they still died relatively quickly(months, not years).
       | 
       | I suspect they'd be fine if I was running a read-only rootfs, but
       | with a lot of the applications I run(i.e. HomeAssistant) you need
       | R/W capability.
        
         | lostapathy wrote:
         | Why on earth would you use the microSD when you were booting
         | off an nvme drive, as is the whole point of the OP?
        
           | jbarberu wrote:
           | I think they're saying it's the longevity, rather than the
           | performance boost, that they're excited about.
        
             | geerlingguy wrote:
             | That's how I read the grandfather comment too--a 3-4 GB/sec
             | NVMe SSD wastes a lot of performance potential on a Pi, but
             | the main thing that is nicer about even low-end SSDs is
             | they have way better write/rewrite longevity than microSD
             | cards, few of which are design in any way for general
             | computing use.
             | 
             | Most microSD cards optimize for only one thing--storing
             | large, sequentially-written video files, then copying them
             | off. Rinse and repeat.
             | 
             | Even some of the fancy "100 MB/sec+" microSD cards only get
             | like 1-2 MB/sec in random access patterns.
        
               | megous wrote:
               | 4k block random read on a regular A1 rated uSD card is
               | 8MiB/s. I benchmark 11MiB/s on some of my Sandisks
               | Ultras, depending on manufacturing date. Writes usually
               | don't matter much, unless you use an inappropriate
               | filesystem for a SD card or sync a lot.
               | 
               | Longevity is longer for SSDs but it's not that bad for
               | uSD cards either. If you setup your system so that there
               | are no pointless writes all the time, they last 3-5
               | years, no problem, and probably more.
               | 
               | The biggest benefit is that uSD cards are much lower
               | power. And unless the use case is very storage heavy,
               | like a constantly accessed database, or backups, SSD is
               | just a waste of resources.
        
               | felipelemos wrote:
               | > If you setup your system so that there are no pointless
               | writes all the time, they last 3-5 years, no problem, and
               | probably more.
               | 
               | Define pointless writes.
        
         | fendy3002 wrote:
         | Not a pi user. Why not SATA? Is it not supported on pi yet?
        
         | mikkelam wrote:
         | log2ram [1] can help you with reducing the writes of logging at
         | least. It saves logging to ram and then writes it once a day.
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/azlux/log2ram
        
           | Avamander wrote:
           | /tmp and /var/log on tmpfs works as well, though it needs a
           | bit of fiddling.
        
           | jakemauer wrote:
           | Thank you for sharing this, it's comments like this that make
           | it hard to give up skimming HN. I have two Pi's running on SD
           | cards that this is immediately beneficial for, so thank you.
        
           | m463 wrote:
           | This is a beautiful little utility.
           | 
           | I've been doing stuff like this manually for years, and
           | usually throwing away what gets logged.
        
         | m463 wrote:
         | You can boot off of usb and use a better (and faster) flash
         | drive.
        
           | willis936 wrote:
           | USB commonly has signal integrity issues. Barring those, the
           | connector can just get jostled and poof there goes storage.
        
       | bullen wrote:
       | 10 watts, how does it not melt?
       | 
       | Both the CM and the NVMe?
        
       | bjt2n3904 wrote:
       | And it still crawls to boot.
       | 
       | I don't know why, but my suspicion is that the Broadcom hardware
       | is seriously gimped by being closed source.
       | 
       | Seriously, just open source stuff already, and let us do the
       | development for you!
        
         | sitzkrieg wrote:
         | the bootloader seems to have a long delay booting for no reason
         | (on all boards), not hw bound but posts are going ignored so
         | far
        
         | jsheard wrote:
         | I wouldn't be surprised if the Pi Foundation is in the process
         | of transitioning away from Broadcom hardware
         | 
         | They're already testing the waters of in-house silicon with the
         | RP2040, an in-house Linux SoC would be the next step
        
           | varispeed wrote:
           | Is RP2040 completely open though?
        
             | jsheard wrote:
             | As far as I know the RP2040 has no secrets, everything is
             | documented in public: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp
             | 2040/rp2040-datasheet.p...
             | 
             | Realistically a Pi Linux SoC would probably be more open
             | than Broadcom hardware, but not completely open. IP blocks
             | they license from 3rd parties (e.g. the GPU) may still have
             | NDA strings attached, and the wireless firmware would still
             | need to be an untinkerable black box to get regulatory
             | approval.
             | 
             | It would still be a step up from Broadcom who won't give
             | you anything until you sign an NDA and commit to buying 10
             | million units and offer up your firstborn child.
        
         | LockAndLol wrote:
         | Is there no open-source alternative to broadcom?
        
           | sitzkrieg wrote:
           | libre computer le potato is a good example of amlogic board
        
           | wmf wrote:
           | Lots of other boards use Allwinner SoCs. I don't know if the
           | RPi Foundation can escape their special relationship with
           | Broadcom.
        
         | coder543 wrote:
         | 7.7s is not "crawling" to boot. I don't think I've _owned_ a
         | computer that boots faster than that, and I 've owned a few
         | fancy, expensive computers over the years. I remember spending
         | a long time optimizing the boot sequence for one of my desktops
         | years ago and I might have gotten close to that... but 7.7s is
         | perfectly fine for something that is neither a microcontroller
         | nor a cloud VM that has no real hardware to initialize.
         | 
         | I just measured, and my M1 MacBook Air takes 32 seconds to boot
         | to the unlock screen, and then a further 8 seconds after the
         | password is entered before it reaches the desktop. As I'm sure
         | you're aware, the M1 processor is no slouch, and Apple includes
         | an NVMe SSD with respectable (though not mind blowing)
         | performance in this laptop.
        
           | bjt2n3904 wrote:
           | Compared to your desktop / laptop? Sure. But this is the
           | embedded world. I've got a minimalist image on a Beaglebone
           | that takes just over 6 seconds to get to a shell from power
           | on. But most of that is loading the kernel and U-Boot from
           | the eMMC. From kernel to shell is 2.2 seconds. And the
           | BeagleBone is long in the tooth, compared to the Pi4.
           | 
           | NVMe absolutely screams for data transfer rates. And
           | according to these tests, using NVMe _adds_ 30 ms to the boot
           | process.
           | 
           | Something is wrong.
        
             | coder543 wrote:
             | > Something is wrong.
             | 
             | Really disagree. Loading a few megabytes of kernel would
             | take way less than a second even on microSD. eMMC can be
             | noticeably faster, yet you're still saying it takes 6
             | seconds on your eMMC BeagleBoard.
             | 
             | Hardware initialization takes time.
             | 
             | Can it be faster? Probably, but you haven't provided a
             | compelling example by referencing the BeagleBoard being one
             | second faster.
             | 
             | 7.7 seconds isn't mind blowing, but it's not crawling. It's
             | more than adequate here.
             | 
             | If they optimize it more in the future... cool.
             | 
             | If you want open systems, the upcoming RISC-V SBC
             | revolution seems likely to be much friendlier than
             | Broadcom, but the Pi is already more open than most ARM
             | platforms, in my opinion.
        
         | Decabytes wrote:
         | While the boot times across the different medias as
         | disappointing for sure, Raspberry PI OS has better boot times
         | then a lot of the other OSes I've tested on the PI4
        
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