New Raspberry Pi available - Pi 4

Yuck, such a mess. Does the Airspy go in there too? :rofl:

Mineral oil cooling was a fad a few years ago amongst PC people. It kind of works, but it’s not really very sensible - it does add a huge thermal mass which takes quite a long time to heat up, but you still have to cool it eventually. It’s horrible to clean up if you need to change any components as well.

If you want to do immersion cooling, then it’s much better to use something like 3M Novec which has a boiling temperature about 35C, so cools with phase change. The gas bubbles away taking the heat with it, so it’s very effective. It costs about £180 a litre so not a cheap way to do it, but it looks cool and isn’t messy like oil is:

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My homebrew dummy load is in oil.

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Right. I see there’s a new release of Buster (26/09/2019).
I’ve downloaded it, written it to an SD card and booted a brand new Pi4 then run the usual

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Is there anything else I should do in order to make sure this is all good and ready to work?

It makes a lot more sense for something like that than submerging a motherboard.

What do you mean?

The official Buster image hasn’t had notable rtl-sdr or airspy issues for a while now.

It’s an early Pi4, it will be on old firmware. Do I need to update it manually or will the Buster install do it automatically?

The firmware is included with the Buster image.

When I ran “sudo apt-get upgrade” on my pi4 it updated the firmware.

How does one determine the firmware version currently installed?

Don’t effing worry about it. :slight_smile:

The firmware is saved in /boot.
There is nothing like the bios which gets written to some other memory that needs to be updated.
It’s all contained on the sd-card, with a current image everything is up to date.

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I have an enquiring mind :smiley:

Not quite true, there is also a boot loader in eeprom.
See:

Yes yes, but it will be auto-update via the standard channels if necessary.

I know there are changes to that being tested, but they are not tested yet.
Maybe you’ll need to do it manually when it’s tested, but it’s not currently something to worry about.

Didn’t think of that even while it was recently posted.
But it doesn’t change anything.

No, you need to install

sudo apt install rpi-eeprom

to automatically update the bootloader.

" We recommend setting up your Pi so that it automatically updates the bootloader: this means
  you will get new features and bug fixes as they are released. Bootloader updates are performed
 by the `rpi-eeprom` package, which installs a service that runs at boot-time to check for critical
  updates.
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@keithma
Hey look i was completely wrong.

One would assume it would have been preinstalled on their images then?
Anyway you could just as well say that it could break a running system.
But i’m all for updating it.

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Odd that this bootloader thing is “hidden” like this. Not sure why?

It’s not the only thing, there is also the VLI firmware which you have referenced previously:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=250990

I think that
sudo apt install rpi-eeprom
is included with the latest Sept 2019 buster desktop image.
I just installed a new image on an RPI4 and it stated that this program was already installed.
It wasn’t installed on my older devices.

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Does your Windows computer update the BIOS at every Windows update?
They are maintained by different people. Debian people don’t really know how the bootloader works in every piece of hardware, and I would not trust them to create the updates to that.
Bootloader comes usually from chipset manufacturer.

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