Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Of particular interest is the
bootcode.bin
firmware file. There are other files like the
*.dat
files. It is unclear when these
dat
files should be replaced. These may depend on
the release of the Raspbian Linux kernel.
$ cd ./firmware−master/boot
$ ls −l
total 37248
−rw−r−−r−− .. 18693 26 Jan 14:31 COPYING.linux
−rw−r−−r−− .. 1447 26 Jan 14:31 LICENCE.broadcom
−rw−r−−r−− .. 17764 26 Jan 14:31 bootcode.bin
−rw−r−−r−− .. 5735 26 Jan 14:31 fixup.dat
−rw−r−−r−− .. 2260 26 Jan 14:31 fixup_cd.dat
−rw−r−−r−− .. 8502 26 Jan 14:31 fixup_x.dat
−rw−r−−r−− .. 2800968 26 Jan 14:31 kernel.img
−rw−r−−r−− .. 9609864 26 Jan 14:31 kernel_emergency.img
−rw−r−−r−− .. 2539540 26 Jan 14:31 start.elf
−rw−r−−r−− .. 569016 26 Jan 14:31 start_cd.elf
−rw−r−−r−− .. 3472580 26 Jan 14:31 start_x.elf
If you think you need a firmware update, copy from this subdirectory to your
Raspberry Pi's
/boot
directory.
VirtualBox Mount of SD Card
All this shuffling images around remotely using
scp
is a nuisance, but it gets the job done.
If you are running VirtualBox, you may find that you can mount the SD card directly. This
allows you to more easily update the SD card file systems, including the modules and
firmware. I'll be showing the VirtualBox procedure for a Mac, but the process is similar for
Windows.
The first step on the Mac is to determine which disk device the SD card is assigned to:
$ diskutil list
In my case, the SD card showed up as
/dev/disk2
(this is obvious because it wasn't
there prior to inserting the SD card).
Next you need to make sure that any mounted file systems from that SD card
are unmounted (the Mac likes to automount everything it can). Using the
diskutil
command, unmount all file systems mounted from
/dev/disk2
:
$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
