6 ms·

This is cool. Whats really holding it back at this point is it's use of a sd card. I find that its pretty difficult to use 4gb of ram on a pi practically, and

• wodenokoto 6y ago
  Could this be fixed by setting aside a few gb of RAM for a virtual RAM drive, and run the OS from there?
  • timthorn 6y ago
    I've gone for an SSD over USB3, and get good performance - though RAMdisk would certainly be faster still and feasible with 8GB.
    • nitrogen 6y ago
      Running from RAM would also be great for having an effectively static system -- just reboot to get a clean slate; the hardware storage needn't even be available after boot.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        IIRC this is the default mode of operation on the Alpine Linux version for the Pi.
  • jakogut 6y ago
    It's fairly trivial to build an entire OS into an initramfs to run from memory. Also, the poor performance of most microSD cards is primarily due to their flash quality, and designed use case in phones and cameras for external storage. Using a quality thumb drive or SSD over USB 3.0 would yield substantially better performance.
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    The OS uses free RAM as a cache for file reads anyway. Temporary directories that are not meant to persist after reboots are often mounted as a ramdisk however.
• test1235 6y ago
  there was this posted a few days ago: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb
• smileybarry 6y ago
  USB boot is coming, beta started a week ago: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=274595 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=274595
  • Orochikaku 6y ago
    Here's a video tutorial on how to utilise this to boot on an SSD by an awesome small electronics hacker: https://youtu.be/zVhYvvrGhMU https://youtu.be/zVhYvvrGhMU
  • znpy 6y ago
    I'm surprised no one is getting excited for pxe boot. That's a game changer.
    • notanote 6y ago
      That’s been available on earlier versions of the Pi (2B v1.2, 3B, 3B+). It was not available at launch for the Pi 4, but was released in beta firmware in late September, and is currently part of the critical firmware update. It works well, allowing separate boot images for each individual Pi on your network.
      • znpy 6y ago
        yup, i tried netbooting on the 3b+, with root on nfs and without an sdcard. > It works well, allowing separate boot images for each individual Pi on your network. could you elaborate a bit more on that?
        • notanote 6y ago
          When using netboot, the boot rom will pull the files it needs from the tftp server. It will first look for them in a subdirectory with the Pi’s serial number as its name. If you’re netbooting without any sdcard installed, I’d suggest disabling sd polling.
          • 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Legogris 6y ago
  You actually can boot straight from USB as of very recently. Something you've always been able to do is to keep just the boot partition on a small SD card and the root on whatever USB device you like. And yes, even with the supposedly best-performing SD cards, they easily become a problem both with performance and failure.
  • dspillett 6y ago
    > You actually can boot straight from USB as of very recently. IITC that is still not officially supported (as a beta-test feature?), though many report it works as intended. In the meantime if people don't want to use a beta feature the boot-from-SD-mount-root-elsewhere option works well too. You could also run it of an NFS share instead of a USB stick, though the performance metrics will differ.
• 2sk21 6y ago
  I also read recently that the lack of cooling can really throttle the performance of a Pi4. Do you have a good heat sink and fan installed?
  • ohazi 6y ago
    If you don't want to think about thermal throttling ever again, get one of these: https://www.seeedstudio.com/ICE-Tower-CPU-Cooling-Fan-for-Raspberry-Pi-Support-Pi-4-p-4097.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/ICE-Tower-CPU-Cooling-Fan-for-Ra...
    • levesque 6y ago
      Isn't that overkill? When are we going to start liquid cooling our raspberry pis? I expect someone to tell me that's already a thing....
      • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        Of course it is:D https://hackaday.com/2017/05/15/liquid-cooling-overclocked-raspberry-pi-with-style/ https://hackaday.com/2017/05/15/liquid-cooling-overclocked-r... https://modmymods.com/water-cooling-kits/raspberry-pi-cooling-kit.html https://modmymods.com/water-cooling-kits/raspberry-pi-coolin...
  • bouvin 6y ago
    The RPi4 was designed with bursts of activity in mind, but for more sustained work without thermal throttling I have had very good experiences with the Argon One case (https://www.argon40.com/catalog/product/view/id/52/s/argon-one-raspberry-pi-4-case/category/4/ https://www.argon40.com/catalog/product/view/id/52/s/argon-o...) and the Flirc case (https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case).
    • mleonhard 6y ago
      Does the Argon One fan push air through the case? In the pictures it looks like it just circulates air inside the case over the CPU.
• giancarlostoro 6y ago
  This is one thing I always appreciated more about the BeagleBone but the Pi being more popular I've gone with it as my main SBC of choice for obvious reasons. The Pi has always been cheaper as well.
• liamness 6y ago
  A new spec for microSD cards (microSD Express) was announced last year, which would let them use similar protocols to SSDs. I don't know if this means they'll support things like TRIM, without which their performance may initially be fast but degrade over time. Still, it would be a significant improvement.
• ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  I totally agree. Even spinning rust leaves “fast” microsd cards in the dust. I hope they can manage to give us m.2 slot in the future.