Raspberry Pi locks down Pi 5 RAM upgrades in firmware
13 points by op
13 points by op
The whole ethos with Pi was you can tinker on it
Not really. The hardware was always locked down. You could play on the GPIO header all you wanted, but the hardware was always off-limits. It's up to you to decide if a company choosing not to support hardware that someone else has modded is a problem or not.
It's up to you to decide if a company choosing not to support hardware that someone else has modded is a problem or not.
That's not what people are taking issue with. That's the pi foundation's publicly stated reason for blocking ram swaps, which people are taking issue with. And it seems like a thin excuse to me.
The wrinkle is that end users don't currently have a good way to know that that's what they're buying. One suggestion I saw was that the pi foundation could start writing "2GB" in large letters on the boards that they ship, so at least an end user who gets an 8GB board that says 2GB knows that the board they've got isn't direct from the pi foundation and has likely been modified/tampered with.
I get the motivation for the pi foundation not to provide support for 3rd-party modified boards. It gets ugly when people don't know that that's what they've got and neither does the person who's providing tech support.
"Weird, the RAM timings in the devicetree are correct but the corruption looks like those timings are too aggressive..."
Or even at the point where an end-user returns a board for RMA and when it gets back to the Pi foundation they realize that it's got a RAM chip on it that they've never sold. Now what?
If they really consider aftermarket ram swaps to be a consumer-facing issue (as opposed to a their-profit-margins-facing issue), they can just warn instead of blocking it outright.
I have a 1GB Pi5, and despite the fact that I have spare electrically-compatible RAM ICs lying around, I can't swap it.
Warn how? The last time I actually had a monitor plugged into a Pi was probably a decade ago.
Don't get me wrong, I very much appreciate the unfortunate situation that you're in with not being able to do the RAM swap. I also appreciate the situation they're in where there's a bunch of resellers who are doing questionable mods to products and reselling them to unsuspecting consumers as genuine products. I'm not sure of a good way to resolve that tension, other than maybe the prominent silkscreen thing I mentioned + maybe a tamper-resistant sticker over top of the RAM IC.
Warn how?
They somehow get undervolt warnings through to the headless OS, I'm sure they can find a mechanism to warn about unauthorized RAM