If you missed the hubbub this week, it was discovered that the Raspberry Pi Foundation added code in the firmware that locks the boot process up if non-original RAM chips …. The Least Annoying of All Evils. Hot-rodding your Pi is a time-honored tradition in these parts.
We do wonder just how many folks are taking the risk of hot-airing the memory off the board, versus paying the extra cash to get one with more RAM. But according to Raspberry Pi, enough boards are showing up that have the RAM surreptitiously replaced, and often defective, that they took the step to lock the machine down. Should users be alerted to potentially unscrupulous behavior by the companies selling them single-board computers.
Our own [Arya Voronova] suggests that it’s no big deal to flash an older version of the initial firmware, and we concur, although it does leave behind all the improvements since 2023, and it will only get less fresh as time goes by. How to announce that the board has non-factory memory without breaking it. [Jeff Geerling] suggested a non-matching-memory bit that users could check, but then they could also neglect to check.
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