My Pi2 v1.1 running Trixie just announced that updates are availalbe. However, they're eeprom updates. To my knowldge a Pi2 has no eeprom. Still, if I let the updater run it makes a big ceremony of downloading and installing _something_.
What's going on?
Thanks for reading, apologies for the recent flood of questions....
bob prohaska
Only Pi4 and Pi5s have eeprom. But all get the update so that if you put that uSD card in a Pi4 or a Pi5 it will update it.
Since there's no eeprom on the Pi2 does the update downloaded and stashed somewhere on the microSD? Or is it installed to /dev/null ?
Thanks for writing,
bob prohaska
It gets stashed on the card somewhere.
IIRC there is a bunch of machine level stuff in the FAT partition - mounts as /boot/firmware - in a live SD situation
These might as well be EEprom really! What else is an SD card?
That's a happy thought but I'm skeptical. If it were true I'd have a lot less trouble booting from USB drives 8-)
Thanks for writing,
bob prohaska
Well those perform the same function as the SD card on a Pi.
I think the issue is that the - ahem *BIOS* - on a Pi is more primitive than a DOS PC used to be.
It just grabs a FAT formatted storage device and looks for a specific bunch of files there and those are the *real* bios.
Isn't that lost in the history of the chips used being designed for Smart TVs?
An EEPROM is can be written/erased one byte at a time.
An SD card uses flash memory that can only be written in blocks, and can only be erased in pages (which are typically larger than write-blocks).
Flash is typically many times cheaper than EEPROM, byte for byte, and its block-structured nature is well suited for mass storage applications whose filesystems are block-oriented anyway.
What I meant was that (tongue in cheek) the functionality was identical. User reprogrammable non volatile storage
Mind you that goes for HD/SSDs as well...
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required