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)

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jezek2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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vanchor3 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	gambiting an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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eqvinox 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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)

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cyanydeez 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

Perfectly rational.

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kotaKat 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.