Add way to easily manage raspberry pi EEPROM from balena dashboard

Feature Requests
1

Whenever we need to modify our raspberry pi’s eeprom, we need to flash the official raspberry pi os on it. It would be great if balena added some features to allow us to upgrade/downgrade, and edit certain eeprom settings from the dashboard.

2

Hello,

Thanks for your suggestion.

Note that for balenaOS >v7.2.0+rev1 we are going to update the eeprom with self update, so your modification will most likely be erased.

See this PR for the changes we have added to support SELF_UPDATE everywhere and fix the flashrom path as well that was broken in some RPI4 versions.

Can you give us a little bit of context on the configurations that you need to add?

Regards,

Yann

3

Hi @ycardaillac, we need to set the following:

BOOT_ORDER=0xf416

PCIE_PROBE=1

This is for booting from NVME as priority.

Thanks,

Brian

4

Hey @bp1313,

We don’t plan for now to add a feature allowing the user to add his own EEPROM. I’ve recorded the need internally, and is this feature request gets support we will implement something.

For the time being, to avoid being blocked by our EEPROM updates, you can add FREEZE_VERSION to your config.txt. See here how to modify the config.txt in balenaOS.

During provisioning simply add FREEZE_VERSION to your config.txt and manually provision the EEPROM. In production set FREEZE_VERSION to your config.txt before making an update to balenaOS >v7.2.0+rev1.

Of course this means that you won’t benefit from automatic updates from our side, so this is something for you to handle.

If you have any issue with any this, don’t hesitate to open a thread in the forum, may be link to the discussion here if possible.

Regards,

Yann