RPi4 Status and xorg behavior (Mar 5 2021 firmware is bad for USB based booting)

[Mark Millard]

On 2021-Mar-10, at 16:16, Klaus Küchemann <maciphone2 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Am 10.03.2021 um 23:28 schrieb Mark Millard via freebsd-arm <freebsd-arm at freebsd.org>:
>> 
>> ……
>> ..
>> (temporarily where https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master/boot/ …
> 
> here too ;-)
> 
> W A R N I N G 
> 
> new CRAPWARE-files from rpi-org-upstream dated Wed, / 10. march 2021/ 02:36
> 
> will kill ' powerd' ( at least on my machine ) :
> — …….
> Starting powerd.
> powerd: no cpufreq(4) support -- aborting: No such file or directory
> /etc/rc: WARNING: failed to start 0.88,  0.38,  0.15    up 0+00:00:59  19:38:39
> ...
> --
> 
> files no further tested because quickly removed from my beautiful system :-) Ha Ha 

I will remind of what the RPi* folks report about using
such github materials (in an raspiOS or raspiOS64 context,
usually via rpi-update use):


https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/raspbian/applications/rpi-update.md
says . . .

QUOTE
WARNING: Pre-release versions of software are not guaranteed to work. You should not use rpi-update on any system unless recommended to do so by a Raspberry Pi engineer. It may leave your system unreliable or even completely broken. It should not be used as part of any regular update process.

. . .

rpi-update will download the latest pre-release version of the linux kernel, its matching modules, device tree files, along with the latest versions of the VideoCore firmware. It will then install these files to relevant locations on the SD card, overwriting any previous versions. 

All the source data used by rpi-update comes from the GitHub repo https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-firmware. This repository simply contains a subset of the data from the official firmware repository, as not all the data from that repo is required.
END QUOTE


https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update says:

QUOTE
This is only intended for use with Raspbian. If you are using a different distribution then check with the maintainers if using rpi-update is safe.

If the distribution ships a custom kernel (e.g. BerryBoot), then it almost certainly is not safe. . . .

Even on Raspbian you should only use this with a good reason.

This gets you the latest bleeding edge kernel/firmware. There is always the possibility of regressions.

Bug fixes and improvements will eventually make their way into new Raspbian releases and apt-get when they are considered sufficiently well tested.

A good reason for using this would be if you like to help with the testing effort, and are happy to risk breakages and submit bug reports. These testers are welcome.

. . .

Backing up before updating is always advisable.
END QUOTE


FreeBSD's kernel is an example of a "custom kernel", even
more so because they are likely presuming linux.

Releases showing up in "apt-get" are only from some of the
tagged commits, no others.

The RPi*'s release and pre-release criteria do not involve
FreeBSD compatibility in any direct way.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)