linux operating system generic

Firmware upgrade

Certain issues may refer you to upgrade the firmware, and raspbian has a utility rpi-update which can do this.

However in case you need to do this manually...

• Firmware on most embedded systems is in a re-flash-able persistent memory store.
• On Raspberry Pi it is on the first partition of the Micro-SD card
• These instructions assume you are executing them from Raspbian

MEDIA_DEVICE=sda
# versions are X.YYYYMMDD - see https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/releases
# e.g. 1.20180817
# leave this blank for latest
RPI_FW_VERSION=
DOWNLOAD_FOLDER=$HOME/Downloads

# Insert the boot media into an SD card reader in the USB
# which may automount, so we unmount and remount on a specific location

sudo umount /dev/${MEDIA_DEVICE}1
sudo umount /dev/${MEDIA_DEVICE}2
sudo mkdir -p /media/$USER/osboot
sudo mkdir -p /media/$USER/osroot
sudo chmod 777 /media/$USER/osboot
sudo chmod 777 /media/$USER/osroot
sudo mount /dev/${MEDIA_DEVICE}1 /media/$USER/osboot
sudo mount /dev/${MEDIA_DEVICE}2 /media/$USER/osroot

if [[ $RPI_FW_VERSION ]] ; then
  BRANCH="--branch $RPI_FW_VERSION"
else
  # get the latest firmware
  BRANCH=
fi

cd $DOWNLOAD_FOLDER
git clone --depth 1 $BRANCH https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/

# Just the firmware, not the kernels
rm firmware/boot/*.img
chmod a+x -R firmware/boot/*
sudo cp firmware/boot/* /media/$USER/osboot
sudo cp firmware/boot/overlays/* /media/$USER/osboot/overlays

# cleanup
sync
sudo umount /dev/${MEDIA_DEVICE}1
sudo umount /dev/${MEDIA_DEVICE}2
sudo rmdir /media/$USER/osboot
sudo rmdir /media/$USER/osroot