Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
While this CMA support is comparatively new, we highly recommend trying it instead
of hardcoding the split for most common use cases. It will improve things like web
browser performance while still allowing for high GPU memory utilization cases on-
demand.
Update the Firmware and Prebuilt Binary
Kernel the Easy Way
HACK 25
Everything's easier when there's a tool for it, and fortunately, Liam
McLoughlin (a.k.a. “Hexxeh”) has created one for updating your Rasp-
berry Pi firmware and kernel.
rpi-update
is a shell script that automates the process of updating the firmware, pre-
built binary kernel, and prebuilt VideoCore SDK files on an SD card containing a Rasp-
berry Pi Linux distribution image.
First, make sure that you have the
readelf
and
git
binaries installed in your chosen
Raspberry Pi Linux distribution. You will need these commands for successful use of
the rpi-update script. On most Linux distributions,
readelf
is in the
binutils
package
and
git
is in the
git
package.
To install it, run the following (as root) on Pidora:
$ su -c 'yum install binutils git'
or Raspbian:
$ su -c 'apt-get install binutils git-core'
To use this script, download it from within your running Raspberry Pi Linux Distribution
image with the following command:
$ wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update
You will need to put it in your
$PATH
and set it executable. The simplest way to do this
is to run the following commands (as root):
$ su -c 'cp rpi-update /usr/bin/'
$ su -c 'chmod +x /usr/bin/rpi-update'
Then, to update the firmware, prebuilt binary kernel, and VideoCore SDK libraries all
at once, simply run (as root):
$ su -c 'rpi-update'
There are, however, a few caveats to using this shortcut tool:
