Raspberry Pi 4 - beta firmware update for USB mass storage boot

README.md

Raspberry Pi 4 - firmware update for USB mass storage boot

Disclaimer

This can be harmful for your RPI4 and please try this at your own risk.
Especially, the steps introduced here broke the WiFi capability of my RPi4.

Reference

Based on:

• https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md

First step

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt full-update
$ sudo rpi-update
$ sudo vi /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update

The file (rpi-eeprom-update) should have this and the critical should be changed to beta:

# FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS="critical"
FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS="beta"

Update with the beta firmware:

$ sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -f /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta/pieeprom-2020-05-15.bin
$ sudo reboot

Check the new version:

$ vcgencmd bootloader_version
May 15 2020 11:05:52

$ vcgencmd bootloader_config
[all]
BOOT_UART=0
WAKE_ON_GPIO=1
POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=0
DHCP_TIMEOUT=45000
DHCP_REQ_TIMEOUT=4000
TFTP_FILE_TIMEOUT=30000
ENABLE_SELF_UPDATE=1
DISABLE_HDMI=0
SD_BOOT_MAX_RETRIES=1
USB_MSD_BOOT_MAX_RETRIES=1
BOOT_ORDER=0xf41

The last argument "BOOT_ORDER" should have number 4 and it indicates that the option for USB mass storage boot is enabled.

Does it really work with USB port?

Let't try if we can use USB port!

1. power off
2. insert the SD card to a SD card reader
3. insert the card reader to RPi4
4. power on

The reason behind of this is that the disk used for USB boot must have elf and dat files.

To use other USB storage, the contents in /boot partition of SD card should be copied in the new storage's /boot. However, even after the file were copied to a new disk, I couldn't use the WiFi.

I should probably wait for the official release.