Raspberry Pi 5 EEPROM update now blocks manual RAM upgrades | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi 5 EEPROM update now blocks manual RAM upgrades

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57 pointscsmantle26 comments

Raspi is likely going to continue making moves like this, since they have gone public. You can't just have people buying the cheaper 1GiB boards and upgrading them to 4GiB, that's taking potential profits away from the investors...

I doubt many are doing this upgrade, and I think its awesome someone has the tooling & skill to do so. I cannot fathom how this is a threat to RPI. I would assume a community firmware patch will likely release & resolve the limitation (until it becomes a signed binary)

Consider the alternative where a bigger number of modded boards with dubious RAM gets into circulation, which is no problem for Chinese companies to do. It would quickly result in a distrust of all RPi products and everyone would suffer.

It also has nothing to do with going public, it is consistent with what they were always doing: it never was fully open, in fact quite the opposite and they were always protective about their HW, you can't even order the SoC as a separate chip, only as a part of premade/customized board.

This doesn't stop dubious RAM from going into circulation, it just prevents different RAM sizes than what it expects. A Chinese company could still swap in faulty RAM bought in bulk as long as it's the same size. This doesn't do anything to protect consumers or brand, just profit margins.

No, if you read the actual post by them they said swapping in parts of the same size won't work either because they program in several other hardware attributes that the board will check for when booting.

> until it becomes a signed binary

It's already a signed binary, with rollback protection. (According to Reddit comments; I stopped using Raspis a long time ago)

Likely botched resellers claiming theyre RPI and the company getting angry customers.

Perfectly rational.

I think what's giving me more concern is: what if the Pi is embedded in a device and the manufacturer doesn't realize the supply chain got tampered with?

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761

One EEPROM update and suddenly you brick the board. It's like the FTDI bullshit. You're going to end up snaring legitimate users that didn't know they had illegitimate boards.

Preventing counterfeit boards with janky memory upgrades, or something, from getting out onto the market seems like a potentially worthwhile thing, but also probably a reaction to an imaginary problem. Preventing end users from doing what they want seems like a bad thing, but given how few users are actually capable of doing this upgrade, also probably an imaginary problem.

Given the state of the world I'm a little amazed anyone can muster any outrage about this.

Except it isn't - 8GB boards that started their lives as 1/2GB variants are absolutely on the market.

>but given how few users are actually capable of doing this upgrade, also probably an imaginary problem.

Just remember that in China there are places where you can get your iPhone storage upgraded by someone desoldering the original chip and soldering on a new one, they get the whole process done in 20 minutes. If labour is cheap and the skills high that's what you get.

And that's awesome! Much better than forcing people to throw away stuff by artificial means, so that the corporation can sell it again to them.

Yeah I mean of course, that is a great thing to have.

Where could I buy one? That's interesting.

I don't know where you can buy one now - but when the 8GB model first came out it was instantly out of stock everywhere except for aliexpress at suspicious prices...it's an anecdote so it's not like I can give you % numbers, but I know 2 people who bought them and they were both clearly re-soldered units(they worked fine though, afaik they are still using them).

A blaring warning might've been better than a full-on block.

Ah this suck, why does every company who goes big have to be hostile to end-user.

Capitalism

In the comments there's a link to consumer rights wiki that includes Raspberry Pi's response to this:

> there may be a minor financial gain in buying a part with say a 2GB part, swapping it for an 8GB part of dubious origin, and reselling it as an 8GB device. However, this brings an element of risk to the user - the board hasn't been tested by us - and is a potential support burden for us, with customers complaining of unreliable devices. We therefore remove the commercial incentive by locking devices to their original RAM size.

Frankly, that sounds pretty reasonable to me

I don't agree. They're stopping the owner of the device from using it how they want to based on a theoretical user who purchases a modded device. There may be some small profit to be had in raw material costs but if you factor in the time it takes to pull off a mod like this, and the number of failures I don't think it's a good argument. Even if it was, why not a warning that you can bypass by setting a config in a txt file in the root of the SD? Or even just typing "I agree I won't bother you about this board" or something?

Personally? I'd say that this is totally unreasonable. Pre-restricting the use cases of the device that YOU bought and have the ownership of is absolutely not OK.

There are a multitude other trivial ways this could be accomplished, but they chose the "lets squeeze the market" and "fuck the modders" option.

The company is a part of the society, and has the responsibility of providing support for their devices. Society provides the customers and money, and the company has the obligation of providing support.

They could just burn the serial to the silicon and when someone needs support, they need to provide the serial and they cross-reference the data tied to the serial number. Too much ram? "Yeah, sorry, we can't guarantee the operation of your device. Here's a 5% off coupon for our store to get one with our genuine hardware"

THIS WAS SUCH AN EASY MARKETING WIN :(

> Pre-restricting the use cases of the device that YOU bought and have the ownership of is absolutely not OK.

This is the same problem I have with my car manufacturer. They completely pre-restricted its flying capability.

This is a shitty bad-faith argument, AND the claim you're making is unfortunately incorrect :D For example, nothing actually restricts you putting your car to bits and using the motor :) It'd be a whole another ordeal that if they'd deliberately try make the car parts to brick themselves in an unknown environment. But they do not. Makes you think.

> potential support burden for us

It's not though.

"Potential" is just that, potential. They're not claiming any actual harm to them about this. It's akin to saying, potentially terrorists could upgrade 1 GB chips for missiles.

There also just isn't a support burden for them.

If I buy a 2 GB RasPi5 and upgraded it into an 8 GB RaspPi5 and then _you buy it from me_ and it does not work. You cannot mail it to the RasPi Foundation and ask for a refund. They will tell you that they don't sell directly to consumers and to contact whomever you bought the device from for the refund.

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I'm fine taking the contrarian opinion that RasPi can lock down their products if they want. But a spade is a spade. It's not about "Potential support burden". It's about the realized profitability of a 8 GB unit over a 2 GB unit.

And they, as proven by "blocking" can add a warning into the OS that the hardware has been modified. They could even make it block, but over-ride with a config setting.

It's not reasonable. Every company uses a similar "consumer safety" excuse for all its locking down. It's why you can't install apps on iPhones. It's why you can't upgrade the RAM on your laptop. It's why you can't replace your battery when it wears out. It's why your car door won't open if you replace the door handle. It's carefully manipulated PR bullshit in every case.

Yeah that practice is not unheard of. I can easily imagine having a ready-made device to desolder the original chip out of Raspberry and solder another one, of poor quality and/or counterfeit, and then sell that modded Pi for profit. Heck, remember fake SD cards, USB drives etc.

Therefore I agree with manufacturer's decision.

No it does not sound reasonable.

If they want to reduce the support burden they can use serial numbers to track what board has what ram - if they don’t match no support because it’s modified hardware.

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