Tech press details the anti-cloning rationale and mechanics
5 Sep 21 6:37 PM · 2d ago · 2 posts · 5 comments · 2 sources · development 5 of 5
Notebookcheck reports that Raspberry Pi frames the lock as fraud prevention against third parties reselling boards with swapped-in cheap RAM, and explains that firmware now encodes memory density, organisation, and timing parameters beyond just capacity, so even same-capacity chip swaps aren't guaranteed to work.
PhilE Raspberry Pi engineer and forum moderatorRaspberry Pi (company) Hardware maker whose firmware enforces the lock
Jeff Geerling YouTuber / Raspberry Pi hardware reviewer
The whole story articlespostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 3 claims were published in its stretch
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first by TechPowerUp, 1d ago · also Tom's Hardware, Hackaday
2 more headlines
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first by TweakTown, 1d ago
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first by Mastodon, 1d ago
What people said 23 voices · best of 24 · verbatim
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> The whole ethos with Pi was you can tinker on it Not really. The hardware was always locked down. You could play on the GPIO header all you wanted, but the hardware was always off-limits. It's up to you to decide if a company choosing not to support hardware that someone else has modded is a problem or not.
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It's always the paying customer/user that gets fucked the most. https://www. tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/ raspberry-pi-locks-boards-to-factory-ram-capacities-in-firmware-engineer-tells-diy-modders-dont-waste-your-time-trying-repairs-or-upgrades-company-cites-shady-reseller-scams # tech # technology # raspberrypi # pi # computers # news # linux #…
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They frame this as fraud-prevention but I don't really buy it.I think of I this way. As a casual/hobbyist user, maybe I'm happy to accept a 10% risk of the device failing prematurely in exchange for saving $20 on a memory upgrade. Ok, so these unscrupulous sellers will never tell me that info up-front...but this defective-by-design system doesn't…
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The wrinkle is that end users don't currently have a good way to know that that's what they're buying. One suggestion I saw was that the pi foundation could start writing "2GB" in large letters on the boards that they ship, so at least an end user who gets an 8GB board that says 2GB *knows* that the board they've got isn't direct from the pi…
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A resurfacing firmware lock is catching out new buyers and tinkerers who want to revive dead hardware. https:// itsfoss.com/opinion/raspberry- pi-blocks-ram-upgrades/
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> There were sellers buying the smallest RAM units, changing the RAM chips, and then reselling them as the higher RAM SKUsThat’s awesome. If it’s economical to do, it’s clearly good for consumers.> The sellers who do this don’t always care to use good RAM chips and may even use QA reject parts.That’s clearly on the sellers.> When the unit doesn’t…
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> Warn how? They somehow get undervolt warnings through to the headless OS, I'm sure they can find a mechanism to warn about unauthorized RAM
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If the ram chips pass proper testing, why should anyone care where they come from?If RMA process includes hardware verification then rpi doesn’t get bled out by absorbing the cost of “counterfeits”If they widely tell people what the market is doing and make all the tools public, they will offload the work of dealing with counterfeits while…
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> It's up to you to decide if a company choosing not to support hardware that someone else has modded is a problem or not. That's not what people are taking issue with. That's the pi foundation's publicly stated reason for blocking ram swaps, which people *are* taking issue with. And it seems like a thin excuse to me.
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It feels like there could be a middle ground here where the Pi would show some annoying error message at boot that the RAM doesn't match the CPU's anticipated spec.Any sellers caught doing this would quickly be flagged by the community as unreliable; also purchase protection is pretty strong these days.
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If they really consider aftermarket ram swaps to be a consumer-facing issue (as opposed to a their-profit-margins-facing issue), they can just warn instead of blocking it outright. I have a 1GB Pi5, and despite the fact that I have spare electrically-compatible RAM ICs lying around, I can't swap it.
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Painful that the RPi higher memory versions are so crazy overpriced that made the RAM swap, an obviously expensive process, meaningful. The solution of ofcourse would be to have market prices that are meaningful rather than trying to retain the overpricing moat through sabotage.
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Warn how? The last time I actually had a monitor plugged into a Pi was probably a decade ago. Don't get me wrong, I very much appreciate the unfortunate situation that you're in with not being able to do the RAM swap. I also appreciate the situation they're in where there's a bunch of resellers who are doing questionable mods to products and…
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Has this allegation been substantiated?The person in the forum thread claimed to be repairing CM5s and CM4s. Unusual but it seems like an otherwise hyper reactive response by the RPi Foundation. Something you wouldn’t batt an eye at if it were Apple instead.
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Drilling holes to prevent RAM upgrades? What is this, a [Commodore PET](
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It is not tjat well known, but this is not the first DRM bullshit from the RPi foundation - they played similar tricks with the camera interface, to force people to use their overpriced camera instead of better and cheaper third party ones.
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But it isn't like an individual would be able to pull off a legitimate RAM swap at a price less than Raspberry Pi Ltd* were already doing it for. So if you're getting a suspiciously cheap Raspberry Pi that's had a RAM swap and it doesn't work correctly, it's on you. The machines have a fixed, known price from approved resellers (ARs). This is…
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The Raspberry Pi was invented to be an accessible open platform that people could modify on their own terms, wasn’t it?And then they got some capital injections and started caring more about the commercial side, didn’t they?
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“The firmware update that disabled RAM swaps was actually from late 2024, two years ago. So you can't blame the RAM pricing situation for this.” But did the reselling problem go back that far? I really doubt this was aimed at user upgrades of RAM. They may be an unfortunate casualty, but I suspect it was really due to support problems and dealing…
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I bought it, if I want to use a tape drive for my RAM I will do that.The way they price their RPi’s - are we even surprised there’s now a market for cheap modified Pi’s with more RAM?
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The much easier and more reasonable solution here would be for the RPi Foundation to ignore RMA requests for boards not bought from them or an authorized reseller.
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Thanks a lot RPi foundation, now I know I can get your boards with more RAM without paying the insane prices in your greedy eshop! ;-)
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What's causing the higher RAM prices that motivate RPi resellers to change RAM chips
All 5 developments of Raspberry Pi confirms firmware locks RAM to factory-shipped… →
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