Updating Raspberry Pi Firmware

Raspberry Pi Ltd

2022-04-29: githash: ba7441c-clean

Updating Raspberry Pi Firmware

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build-date: 2022-04-29
build-version: githash: ba7441c-clean

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Legal Disclaimer Notice 1

Updating Raspberry Pi Firmware

Document version history

Release Date Description

1.0 24 May 2021 Initial release

1.1 27 April 2022 Copy edit, public release

Scope of document
This document applies to the following Raspberry Pi products:

Pi 0 Pi 1 Pi 2 Pi 3 Pi 4 Pi 400 CM 1 CM 3 CM 4 Pico

0 W H A B A B B All All All All All All

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Document version history 2

Updating Raspberry Pi Firmware

Introduction
In some circumstances it may be necessary to update the VideoCore firmware in a Raspberry Pi operating system (OS)
image without going through the normal upgrade process. This whitepaper documents how to use the normal upgrade
process, and also gives information on how to bypass the standard update process if it is not suitable.

Introduction 3
Updating Raspberry Pi Firmware

Why you might need new firmware

The firmware on Raspberry Pi devices is upgraded over time. Possible reasons for an upgrade might be:

• Bug fixes
• Support for new processors (e.g. moving from Raspberry Pi 3 to Raspberry Pi 4)
• Support for new memory chips
• Support for new revisions of the printed circuit board (PCB)
It is not possible to make the firmware forward compatible, i.e. to be able to cope with future changes in hardware;
however, every effort is made to make the firmware backward compatible, in that the latest firmware should always work
on older products without causing any regressions.

For example, there are various revisions of the Raspberry Pi 4 PCB. The latest versions require the latest firmware to work
correctly, in part due to changes in the power management chips on the PCB, which require a different startup sequence.
If you use Raspberry Pi 4s in a third-party product, you could find that when you take delivery of a new batch of Raspberry
Pi 4 devices they are a newer revision, and your standard distribution, with older firmware, no longer works correctly.

Why you might need new firmware 4

Updating Raspberry Pi Firmware

The standard upgrade process

There are standard commands you can use in the Raspberry Pi OS (and many third-party OS distributions) that will
upgrade the system and any firmware. Raspberry Pi Ltd recommends using these processes wherever possible.

To upgrade the Linux kernel and all Raspberry Pi–specific firmware to the latest release version, the following commands
should be used:

sudo apt update

sudo apt full-upgrade

Note that this process will not upgrade between major OS versions. While it is possible to implement a full upgrade
between major versions in place, Raspberry Pi Ltd does not recommend this — it is not a tested procedure due to the huge
number of changes involved. In this case we recommend starting afresh, installing the OS from scratch on a new Secure
Digital (SD) card using Raspberry Pi Imager. You will need to reinstall all the required software in a new installation.

The standard upgrade process 5

Updating Raspberry Pi Firmware

Updating only the firmware

Sometimes, going through the standard upgrade procedure may not be possible. For example, you may have a
customised distribution with no update facilities, or that cannot be upgraded without causing further issues. In these
circumstances, and possibly others, you will need to update the firmware files in the distribution manually.

You can download the firmware files from the following location:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/archive/refs/heads/stable.zip

This zip file contains a number of items, but the ones we are interested in at this stage are in the boot folder. The firmware
files have names of the form start*.elf, and their associated support files are fixup*.dat.

The basic principle is to copy the required start and fixup files from this zip file to replace the same named files in the
destination OS image. The exact process will depend on how the OS has been set up, but this is an example of how it
would be done for a Raspberry Pi OS image:

1. Extract or open the zip file so you can access the required files.

2. Open up the boot folder in the destination OS image (this could be on an SD card, or a disk-based copy).

3. Determine which start.elf and fixup.dat files are present in the destination OS image.

4. Copy those files from the zip archive to the destination image.

The image should now be ready for use on the latest Raspberry Pi Ltd hardware.

Updating only the firmware 6