hartl3y94 / rpi4

Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI Firmware Images [EXPERIMENTAL]

Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI Firmware Images

Summary

This repository contains EXPERIMENTAL installable builds of the official EDK2 Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI firmware.

Initial Notice

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING:
🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻

• Do NOT expect this firmware to be fully functional when it comes to supporting your ARM64 OS of choice or providing all the features you would expect from a regular UEFI platform. This is EXPERIMENTAL software.

• You will NOT get Ethernet networking support in Linux, unless you use a recent Linux kernel (version 5.7 or later) or one into which the 5.7 fixes have been backported.

• You will NOT get SD or wireless support in Linux, unless you use a recent Linux kernel (version 5.12 or later) or one into which the 5.12 fixes have been backported as well as a recent Linux wireless firmware package.

• You may not be able to use more than 3 GB of RAM, even if you have a 4 GB or 8 GB model, unless your OS is patched for DMA access (which, in Linux, requires kernel 5.8 or later). This is the result of a hardware bug in the Broadcom CPU that powers the Rapsberry Pi 4.
  To use more than 3 GB, and provided your OS has been patched for such use, you need to go to Device Manager → Raspberry Pi Configuration → Advanced Settings in the UEFI settings.

• There is NO WiFi support in Windows at the moment.

• Be very mindful that not everything you want can be solved through a UEFI firmware update. Especially, some elements to make an OS fully functional do require an OS update, an OS workaround or new OS drivers, such as the ones mentioned above, which are beyond the scope of this project.

• This firmware was built from the official EDK2 repository, with the following extra patch applied:

  • 0001-MdeModulePkg-UefiBootManagerLib-Signal-ReadyToBoot-o.patch, so that the Graphical console is set as default.

🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺

Installation

• Download the latest archive from the Releases repository.

• Create an SD card or a USB drive, with at least one partition (it can be a regular partition or an ESP) and format it to FAT16 or FAT32.

  Note: Booting from USB or from ESP requires a recent-enough version of the Pi EEPROM (as well as a recent version of the UEFI firmware). If you are using the latest UEFI firmware and find that booting from USB or from ESP doesn't work, please visit https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/releases to update your EEPROM.

• Extract all the files from the archive onto the partition you created above.
  Note that outside of this Readme.md, which you can safely remove, you should not change the names of the extracted files and directories.

Usage

Insert the SD card/plug the USB drive and power up your Raspberry Pi. You should see a multicoloured screen (which indicates that the CPU-embedded bootloader is reading the data from the SD/USB partition) and then the Raspberry Pi black and white logo once the UEFI firmware is ready.

At this stage, you can press Esc to enter the firmware setup, F1 to launch the UEFI Shell, or, provided you also have an UEFI bootloader on the SD card or on a USB drive in efi/boot/bootaa64.efi, you can let the UEFI system run that (which will be the default if no action is taken).

Additional Notes

The firmware provided in the zip archive is the RELEASE version but you can also find a DEBUG build of the firmware in the GitHub CI artifacts.

The provided firmwares should be able to auto-detect the UART being used (PL011 or mini UART) according to whether config.txt contains the relevant overlay or not. The default baudrate for serial I/O is 115200 and the console device to use under Linux is either /dev/ttyAMA0 when using PL011 or /dev/ttyS0 when using miniUART.

At the moment, the published firmwares default to enforcing ACPI as well as a 3 GB RAM limit, which is done to ensure Linux boot. These settings can be changed by going to Device Manager → Raspberry Pi Configuration → Advanced Configuration.

Please visit https://rpi4-uefi.dev/ for more information.

License

The firmware (RPI_EFI.fd) is licensed under the current EDK2 license, which is BSD-2-Clause-Patent.

The other files from the zip archives are licensed under the terms described in the Raspberry Pi boot files README.

The binary blobs in the firmware/ directory are licensed under the Cypress wireless driver license that is found there.