On: Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB

[cogburnd02]

I wonder if this will help improve its status on https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers, moving it out of the category of SBCs which have "fatal flaws"

[yjftsjthsd-h → cogburnd02]

Boot media isn't the problem, proprietary firmware is, and that's not changing here.

[cogburnd02 → yjftsjthsd-h]

So where does the firmware reside? On the sd card/usb drive? Or on a chip on-board? Or somewhere else I haven't thought of?

[yjftsjthsd-h → cogburnd02]

I believe the main blob is loaded from the SD card and boots the GPU, which then starts the CPU and loads the OS (the Pi architecture is weird), although I suppose there must be some tiny blob on a chip on the actual Pi board to load that stage from the SD card. There's an attempt to make an replacement for the part on the SD card: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware