Raspberry Pi4 announced

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Tz been a while.

The foundation announced its full (kernel and userland) 64bit Rasberry PI OS more then a month ago. Beta.

That's nice. Let see which audio OSes jump on the train first. Go for it.
It's well worth it.


And then the foundation finally managed to introduce USB boot with
firmware pieeprom-2020-06-15.bin (currently stable).

No more need for SD cards. That's what many people have been looking for. ;)
Hmmh. I do think it'll still take a while to see that package being installed on brandnew boards by default.
Until then you have to wait until the package becomes stat "critical" so that i gets installed by your fav OS automatically. Otherwise DIY.

Yep. I know. The foundation calls its actually stable firmware "critical". And foundation "stable" is actually "beta". Let's not discuss this.

There's also a new USB host controller firmware under development, solving some USB related issues.

*******


It's now 1 year since I started this thread...

...and the RPI4 is still work in progress.


Enjoy.
 
Yep. Comes just more then a year late! :D

There'll be a lead time for OEMs to build their HW around it.
By then we'll have a RPI5. ;)
Happened to Allo last year. Launching an RPI3 CM based device during the RPI4 launch period. Basically solving issues that also been solved partially and some even bettered on the RPI4. That's been bad luck.

Anyhow.

Good news that there's progress.

Finally you can attach an external Wifi Antenna. Hopefully the next RPI gets this feature too.

On the next generation RPI I'd really like to see at least a 2nd PCI lane.
All the USB3 ports and GB-ethernet just kill that single lane.
 
Nice overview.

What's the bandwidth of the AMBA bus?

PCI X1 is limited by 4GBit/s if I am not mistaken. The whole USB3/2 setup vastly overwhelms that bandwidth already.

Somehow ethernet doesn't perform 100%. I think I mentioned that before. That made me think that somehow ethernet and USB interferes. Perhaps also Amba is a bottleneck!?!?

Or the tiny processor, controllers etc. and surroundings simply get overwhelmed
under high load conditions.

If the foundation feeds too many high speed IFs to Amba, I guess only a faster SOC
will do to cope with it. With X1 PCI the USB area will never be able to run at full speed.
 
No more need for SD cards.

Volumio for example doesn't boot from USB. Did not try an SSD.

My RPI 4 revision 1.4 8Gb hosting LMS squeezelite & Jivelite works fine via WIFI connected to an old slow TS-412 QNAP NAS.

Only one problem:
Re-scanning media library 250.000 all tagged tracks takes 10-12 hours. On gigabit ethernet drops to 5-6 hours.

I recommend using a fixed IP for server & NAS or create static routes on the router like I did.
 
The maintainers have to integrate USB boot properly. The foundation now uses partid as partition identifiers. That's just one change if I am not mistaken. All these changes need to be integrated first to get going.

Not sure how compatible that is with the old stuff they also have to support.
Beside that Volumio is known to be quite slow on adapting to the newest developments.

A lot would change. Writing images to SSD asf. I am not surprised not to see that much movement on that account.

Not sure where all this leads.

In the end - at one point - they all have to start at least maintaining 2 images (32/64 bit PI3/4 vs the rest). For sure all these guys will have a lot more work to do.


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I just read that the CM4 doesn't have the USB controller onboard. That would not be
very nice. I havn't really followed up on it though. I don't know the details.
 
CM4 has the USB2 dwc2 IP integrated in SoC available on its connectors. Many embedded uses do not require the extra USB3 (especially when using the onboard eMMC for system and storage) but would have use for the PCI-e line instead. If USB3 is required, it's just an extra chip hooked to the PCI-e bus on the integration board. But other people would use NVMe drive or e.g. a regular PCI-e (or PCI + bridge) soundcard or countless other PCI-e devices instead. Good decision, IMO.
 
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