I replaced my custom nightmare of nixos on rpi5 (too much disk space used, too much IO used for raspberry) to a raspbian+arm+homebrew and i could not be happier
Oh no, i was going to setup the same, would you mind sharing more details? I just need a text-only linux for basic stuff. Do you share your nixos config anywhere?
Good reminder that the Raspberry Pis only have good software support if you stick to whatever the foundation is releasing. Because that same foundation has stayed obsessed with their weird custom ways of doing things, instead of furthering efforts like UEFI on ARM. Some of it is insultingly stupid - like for revD of the 5, you better now update the magic boot partition of your RPi with the device tree overlay for revD, because it will use the old device tree, but also expect the overlay to be there so it can actually work. To say the least, that is never what overlays were supposed to be for.
> custom ways of doing things, instead of furthering efforts like UEFI on ARM.
I thought uBoot was more or less the standard way of booting embedded Linux? Is it really worth bringing the entire UEFI environment, which is basically a mini OS, to such devices? Embedded devices are often designed to handle power loss or even be unplugged by users, so the boot up process is generally as lean as possible.
Secure Boot is still supported in that configuration, but with PK/db/dbx being part of the firmware configuration and updating them requiring a UEFI capsule update.
This is exactly why I’ve to replaced my home server by a low-power x86 NUC instead. No custom build needed to run NixOS and idle power consumption turns out to be slightly lower than the Raspberry Pi 5.
Idle consumption is truly horrid on the Pi 5, even with all the hacks and turning absolutely everything off and hobbling the SoC to 500 Mhz it's imposible to get it under 2W. I'm convinced that the Pi Foundation doesn't think battery powered applications are like, a thing that physically exists.
I’m using an ASUS NUC 14 Essential Kit N355. It’s a bit more expensive than the Pi 5, but also more powerful (8 cores and decent GPU). There is also a more affordable N150 model. And even lower budget are the N150 mini PCs from Chinese manufacturers, but they often mess up things like cooling in a hardware revision (compared to the favorable review that you’d read).
And forgot to mention this before: Intel CPUs with built-in GPUs have very performant and energy efficient hardware video codecs, whereas the Raspberry Pi 5 is limited and lacks software support.
I get 3-5W, mostly 4W on my N100 nuc. WiFi disabled through bios. And I ran powertop and made the suggested changes. 1 stick of 16gib lpDDR5, 1 nvme ssd, 1 4TB SATA ssd. Under full cpu load usage goes up to 8-12W. When also the gpu is busy with encoding the consumption grows to 20-24W. This is with turbo clock enabled. With it disabled power draw stays around 4W, but it is annoyingly slow I enabled turbo again and just content with the odd power peak.
I am not the OP, but I got an $150 (at a time) fanless quad core Celeron box at Aliexpress about 5 years ago, and it just runs with zero problems with openmediavault and dockers. Attached is external HDD over USB 3, it’s still fast enough (and the HDD is the bottleneck, not the USB interface).
Few months ago it was possible to get Intel N100 (i5-6400 performance at much lower power) based mini PC with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD for 100-120 USD on sale. Unfortunately, 'rampocalypse' happened.
It is acutely on point. The only reason people have to put in work again and again to fix distributions like Fedora for Raspberry Pi models is because the foundation pulls stunts like that revD. Right now, you can take Buildroot at git master, build an RPi image and have it randomly not work on one of two what looks like identical RPi 5 boards. That's bad, and there is no reason for it.
Your comment only serves to illustrate exactly why big companies like BRCM are not seeing the case the way you do. Apple, if you want to start naming names puts out hardware that is far more closed than the Raspberry Pi foundation and yet you don't see the same level of aggression against Apple. What you do see is a couple of very talented hackers that won't take 'you can't' for an answer and that will RE stuff until they know enough to scratch their itch.
That's the way you solve these problems, not by writing take-downs.
Not having UEFI on ARM has never held me back. I do have a nice Apple laptop lying around here that is unusable because the network drivers need a functioning copy of Apple's OS on that machine to get bootstrapped. Rather than bitching at Apple about it I just stopped using and buying their products.
Apple can afford to spend as much as they want on this and they are in control, they're as vertically integrated as it gets. Heck, they could divert some of their developer toll to this.
The Raspberry Pi foundation is emphatically not in control of Broadcom, and in spite of their success still has limited resources and needs to work with what they've got and to prioritize.
> Apple, if you want to start naming names puts out hardware that is far more closed than the Raspberry Pi foundation and yet you don't see the same level of aggression against Apple.
Ooooh of course, I 'member the days right here when they announced they'd drop Intel. And I am fairly certain the echo across the tech blogosphere was what led them to, while not openly announcing they'd support a competing OS like they did with Bootcamp, they'd at least not lock down the bootloader like on iOS devices.
> What you do see is a couple of very talented hackers that won't take 'you can't' for an answer and that will RE stuff until they know enough to scratch their itch.
Apple, to my knowledge, never explicitly said "you can't" - at least not on Mac devices, for iOS the situation is different. All they're saying is "we won't help you, but you may try your best".
> Not having UEFI on ARM has never held me back.
The thing is the lack of UEFI adoption in the ARM sphere is holding everyone back! An OS / distribution shouldn't have to manage devicetree overlays on its own, they should be provided by the BIOS/UEFI management layer as a finished component.
RPi is the biggest toppest dog in the embedded world, at least when it comes to an ecosystem. They would have all the muscle needed to force everyone else's hand.
> I do have a nice Apple laptop lying around here that is unusable because the network drivers need a functioning copy of Apple's OS on that machine to get bootstrapped.
What did you do to that thing? On any pre-ARM machine, the bare bootloader should always, even if the primary storage is gone, be able to bring up enough hardware to support a UI, an USB and networking stack to allow restoring it from the Internet. ARM machines I'm not sure, haven't had the misfortune of having to dig down that deep, but I think even they should be able to do that in case you somehow manage to fry your partition table. And even if you managed to fry that, any other Apple device should be able to do a DFU restore on its lowest level bootloader.
Agreed that the EUFI thing could be better, but I don't see how you could compel Raspberry Pi to fix it without knowing the exact details of the license agreement that the foundation signed with Broadcom and I suspect that that more than anything is what is holding this back. It's not as if they're deaf or can't read at the Raspberry Pi foundation.
As for that machine: it's got a bunch of stuff on it and I have dongle with ethernet so I can live without it. It's one of the last line of Intel portables they made and there just aren't enough people that want this fixed and I'm not smart enough to fix it.
Meanwhile, and probably ironically, that too is a Broadcom chip...
I replaced my custom nightmare of nixos on rpi5 (too much disk space used, too much IO used for raspberry) to a raspbian+arm+homebrew and i could not be happier
Oh no, i was going to setup the same, would you mind sharing more details? I just need a text-only linux for basic stuff. Do you share your nixos config anywhere?
Sadly, I came to the same conclusion. This is also why I no longer buy raspberry pis.
Good reminder that the Raspberry Pis only have good software support if you stick to whatever the foundation is releasing. Because that same foundation has stayed obsessed with their weird custom ways of doing things, instead of furthering efforts like UEFI on ARM. Some of it is insultingly stupid - like for revD of the 5, you better now update the magic boot partition of your RPi with the device tree overlay for revD, because it will use the old device tree, but also expect the overlay to be there so it can actually work. To say the least, that is never what overlays were supposed to be for.
> custom ways of doing things, instead of furthering efforts like UEFI on ARM.
I thought uBoot was more or less the standard way of booting embedded Linux? Is it really worth bringing the entire UEFI environment, which is basically a mini OS, to such devices? Embedded devices are often designed to handle power loss or even be unplugged by users, so the boot up process is generally as lean as possible.
U-Boot nowadays speaks UEFI :) (and so does LK)
New Android devices all use a UEFI bootloader: https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/bootloader...
SecureBoot might be more useful than UEFI on SBC like Pi.
The grub EFI shim is signed, but does or doesn't verify kernel image and initrd and module (and IDK optionally drive and CPU and RAM hw) signatures?
mokutil does module signature key enrollment. Kernel modules must be signed with a key enrolled in the BIOS otherwise they won't be loaded.
To implement SecureBoot without UEFI would be to develop an alternate bootloader verification system.
But what does grub or uboot or p-boot do after the signed grub shim is verified?
mokutil and these commands don't work without UEFI:
Note that UEFI doesn't mean supporting most of those.
UEFI without runtime UEFI variable writes is a thing, and that configuration is incompatible with mokutil.
FWIU,
There is no SecureBoot without UEFI.
UEFI without SecureBoot does have advantages over legacy BIOS with DOS MBR.
> UEFI without runtime UEFI variable writes is a thing
Which vendors already support this?
Do any BIOS - e.g. coreboot - support disabling online writes to EFI? (with e.g. efibootmgr or efivar or /sys/firmware/efi)
One of the initial use cases for SecureBoot is preventing MBR malware.
What there be security value to addding checksums or signatures as args to each boot entry in grub.cfg for each kernel image and initial ramdrive?
Unless /boot is encrypted, it's possible for malware to overwrite grub.cfg to just omit signatures for example.
> Which vendors already support this?
One implementation I've seen in the wild is: https://docs.nvidia.com/jetson/archives/r36.4/DeveloperGuide...
Secure Boot is still supported in that configuration, but with PK/db/dbx being part of the firmware configuration and updating them requiring a UEFI capsule update.
Looks like UKI include the initrd in what EFI checks the signature of.
Add signature checking for grub.cfg (instead of just the EFI shim) but that requires enrolling a local key
Add initrd signatures to grub.cfg
This is exactly why I’ve to replaced my home server by a low-power x86 NUC instead. No custom build needed to run NixOS and idle power consumption turns out to be slightly lower than the Raspberry Pi 5.
Idle consumption is truly horrid on the Pi 5, even with all the hacks and turning absolutely everything off and hobbling the SoC to 500 Mhz it's imposible to get it under 2W. I'm convinced that the Pi Foundation doesn't think battery powered applications are like, a thing that physically exists.
Allow me to ask you what’s the NUC computer you are using?
I’m using an ASUS NUC 14 Essential Kit N355. It’s a bit more expensive than the Pi 5, but also more powerful (8 cores and decent GPU). There is also a more affordable N150 model. And even lower budget are the N150 mini PCs from Chinese manufacturers, but they often mess up things like cooling in a hardware revision (compared to the favorable review that you’d read).
And forgot to mention this before: Intel CPUs with built-in GPUs have very performant and energy efficient hardware video codecs, whereas the Raspberry Pi 5 is limited and lacks software support.
And what is the idle power draw that you're seeing on the NUC? Out of the box or did you have to mess around with BIOS and powertop?
I get 3-5W, mostly 4W on my N100 nuc. WiFi disabled through bios. And I ran powertop and made the suggested changes. 1 stick of 16gib lpDDR5, 1 nvme ssd, 1 4TB SATA ssd. Under full cpu load usage goes up to 8-12W. When also the gpu is busy with encoding the consumption grows to 20-24W. This is with turbo clock enabled. With it disabled power draw stays around 4W, but it is annoyingly slow I enabled turbo again and just content with the odd power peak.
I'm seeing 4-4.5 Watt idle. I've disabled WiFi in the BIOS (using wired Ethernet) and ran `powertop --auto-tune`, but not much else.
I am not the OP, but I got an $150 (at a time) fanless quad core Celeron box at Aliexpress about 5 years ago, and it just runs with zero problems with openmediavault and dockers. Attached is external HDD over USB 3, it’s still fast enough (and the HDD is the bottleneck, not the USB interface).
Few months ago it was possible to get Intel N100 (i5-6400 performance at much lower power) based mini PC with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD for 100-120 USD on sale. Unfortunately, 'rampocalypse' happened.
I wonder if I can run this on a 2 year old celeron laptop
You can run this on a 10 year old celeron laptop.
Could these choices have anything to with the alleged focus on Compute Module and less focus on the "normal" Raspberry? Does anyone know?
not really, it has been like that since day1. it has more to do with the weird architecture of the bcm chips they use.
When your SoC is a GPU with CPU cores tacked on, it's a bit weird to boot things up.
[flagged]
It is acutely on point. The only reason people have to put in work again and again to fix distributions like Fedora for Raspberry Pi models is because the foundation pulls stunts like that revD. Right now, you can take Buildroot at git master, build an RPi image and have it randomly not work on one of two what looks like identical RPi 5 boards. That's bad, and there is no reason for it.
And you would solve this how?
Your comment only serves to illustrate exactly why big companies like BRCM are not seeing the case the way you do. Apple, if you want to start naming names puts out hardware that is far more closed than the Raspberry Pi foundation and yet you don't see the same level of aggression against Apple. What you do see is a couple of very talented hackers that won't take 'you can't' for an answer and that will RE stuff until they know enough to scratch their itch.
That's the way you solve these problems, not by writing take-downs.
Not having UEFI on ARM has never held me back. I do have a nice Apple laptop lying around here that is unusable because the network drivers need a functioning copy of Apple's OS on that machine to get bootstrapped. Rather than bitching at Apple about it I just stopped using and buying their products.
Apple doesn't pretend to be open.
Apple can afford to spend as much as they want on this and they are in control, they're as vertically integrated as it gets. Heck, they could divert some of their developer toll to this.
The Raspberry Pi foundation is emphatically not in control of Broadcom, and in spite of their success still has limited resources and needs to work with what they've got and to prioritize.
> Apple, if you want to start naming names puts out hardware that is far more closed than the Raspberry Pi foundation and yet you don't see the same level of aggression against Apple.
Ooooh of course, I 'member the days right here when they announced they'd drop Intel. And I am fairly certain the echo across the tech blogosphere was what led them to, while not openly announcing they'd support a competing OS like they did with Bootcamp, they'd at least not lock down the bootloader like on iOS devices.
> What you do see is a couple of very talented hackers that won't take 'you can't' for an answer and that will RE stuff until they know enough to scratch their itch.
Apple, to my knowledge, never explicitly said "you can't" - at least not on Mac devices, for iOS the situation is different. All they're saying is "we won't help you, but you may try your best".
> Not having UEFI on ARM has never held me back.
The thing is the lack of UEFI adoption in the ARM sphere is holding everyone back! An OS / distribution shouldn't have to manage devicetree overlays on its own, they should be provided by the BIOS/UEFI management layer as a finished component.
RPi is the biggest toppest dog in the embedded world, at least when it comes to an ecosystem. They would have all the muscle needed to force everyone else's hand.
> I do have a nice Apple laptop lying around here that is unusable because the network drivers need a functioning copy of Apple's OS on that machine to get bootstrapped.
What did you do to that thing? On any pre-ARM machine, the bare bootloader should always, even if the primary storage is gone, be able to bring up enough hardware to support a UI, an USB and networking stack to allow restoring it from the Internet. ARM machines I'm not sure, haven't had the misfortune of having to dig down that deep, but I think even they should be able to do that in case you somehow manage to fry your partition table. And even if you managed to fry that, any other Apple device should be able to do a DFU restore on its lowest level bootloader.
Agreed that the EUFI thing could be better, but I don't see how you could compel Raspberry Pi to fix it without knowing the exact details of the license agreement that the foundation signed with Broadcom and I suspect that that more than anything is what is holding this back. It's not as if they're deaf or can't read at the Raspberry Pi foundation.
As for that machine: it's got a bunch of stuff on it and I have dongle with ethernet so I can live without it. It's one of the last line of Intel portables they made and there just aren't enough people that want this fixed and I'm not smart enough to fix it.
Meanwhile, and probably ironically, that too is a Broadcom chip...
Very sorry, but people are allowed to have opinions and to express them. If the opinions upset you, then don't read them - by your logic anyway.
[dead]
The first rule of bringup is thermal support.
and sleep
Just another Raspberry Pi HAT ;)
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You have been able to run full Linux distros on Raspberry Pi for ages. Ubuntu since 23.10 and Debian most notably.
Honestly, a Pi 5 is powerful enough to run a full desktop very comfortably. It's not a low-powered computer anymore by any means.
Indeed, after adding the NVME SSD card and installing Ubuntu on the drive, it's my daily driver.
great