Hynix RAM 512MB

Thing is, I have seen a lot of problems in the forums where people had bought a package from either Farnellor CPC, Maplin etc that included a card with a pre-written image. My normal suggestion in these circumstances was to re-flash the card and pretty much all the time it worked again. I made the erroneous assumption that the post office must be nuking the cards somehow, but it would now appear to be for the reasons posted here.

I can't imagine any of the big distributors constantly updating the bundled SD cards they are selling, and I think it is unfair to expect a person who has paid a premium for a card with an image on it, to have to go through that process themselves.

I also am a little confused as to why a semi-incompatible part is being used.

Steve

> I also am a little confused as to why a semi-incompatible part is being used.

Apparently the firmware, which is part of the binary blob loaded from the SD card,

interrogates the RAM chip to find it's type, and initializes it differently depending

on the type.  If an unrecognized RAM type is found, then booting fails.  No error

message is displayed to the user, because booting hasn't gotten far enough.

Perhaps LEDs could be used to indicate the failure reason, but that isn't done.

On a typical PC, this firmware would be in a nonvolatile memory chip attached

to the motherboard, rather than included with a downloaded OS image, so there

would be much less chance that an older OS image would fail to work with a

newer RAM chip.

The firmware was apparently updated on github on January 16, and there was

apparently a warning on the rpi download page earlier this month, but as of

today, I don't see any warning on either the rpi or element14 download pages,

and it looks to me that the element14 download images all predate the firmware update.

Better communication would certainly be helpful when hardware changes are made

that are incompatible with previous OS downloads.

coder27 wrote:

Better communication would certainly be helpful when hardware changes are made

that are incompatible with previous OS downloads.

As well all know, the Foundation are normally so good at clear communication and never resort to obfuscation

I really don't think it is acceptable that the answer for everything seems to be re-image, a lot of people have spent time getting builds just as they want them. It would appear you can just put on a new start.elf, but how many people will truly know how to do that ?

I think there should be a prominent message on the downloads page and also a slip of paper in any new Pi's sent out, just to make things that little bit easier?

Steve

coder27 wrote:

Better communication would certainly be helpful when hardware changes are made

that are incompatible with previous OS downloads.

As well all know, the Foundation are normally so good at clear communication and never resort to obfuscation

I really don't think it is acceptable that the answer for everything seems to be re-image, a lot of people have spent time getting builds just as they want them. It would appear you can just put on a new start.elf, but how many people will truly know how to do that ?

I think there should be a prominent message on the downloads page and also a slip of paper in any new Pi's sent out, just to make things that little bit easier?

Steve