rpi-eeprom/firmware/release-notes.md

Raspberry Pi4 bootloader EEPROM release notes

2020-04-12 Update beta+stable recovery.bin

* If the VL805 image was updated but the bootloader was not then
  recovery.bin would incorrectly switch to infinite flashing activity
  LED pattern used in the rescue image to prevent infinite reboots.
  Fix recovery.bin to reboot in this case. The current 'critical'
  release does not have this problem.
* Fix uart_2ndstage logging in beta/stable recovery image.
* Change recovery.bin to reboot instead of displaying an error patern
  if there are no EEPROM images. The Raspberry Pi Image makes it very
  difficult to create a broken rescue image but a stray recovery.bin
  could stop Raspbian from booting.
* Fix detection of VL805 EEPROM in recovery.bin

N.B. These recovery.bin file used for critical updates and the rescue
image does not suffer from these bugs.

2020-04-09 Add 2020-04-09 beta firmware.

* Experimental tweaks for PLL analog setup to reduced jitter and
  improve PCIe reliability on slower silicon.

2020-04-07 Promote 2020-03-19 beta firmware to stable.

* No major bugs reported. Promote this to stable as a step
  towards getting HDMI diagnostics into the default firmware
  via a critical update.

2020-03-19 Add 2020-03-19 beta firmware

* Minor mods for manufacture test.

2020-03-16 Add 2020-03-16 beta firmware

* Fix DHCP Option97 GUID generation. The MAC LSB portion was previously
  always zero.

2020-03-11 Add 2020-03-04 beta firmware recovery

* Support static IP address configuration. The following fields may be
  set manually using dotted decimal address. If set, then DHCP if skipped.
   * CLIENT_IP
   * SUBNET
   * GATEWAY
   * TFTP_IP
* If a fatal bootloader error occurs then an HDMI diagnostics screen is 
  displayed at VGA/DVI resolution on both outputs for two minutes. 
  This may be disabled by setting DISABLE_HDMI=1 in the EEPROM 
  configuration OR setting display_splash=1 in config.txt.
* Allow the PXE menu option to match a custom string specified by
  PXE_OPTION43. The default is still "Raspberry Pi Boot"
* DHCP_OPTION97 - The default GUID has now changed to 
  RPI4+BOARD_ID+ETH_MAC_LSB+SERIAL in order to make it easier to
  automatically identify Raspberry Pi computers. The old behaviour
  is enabled by setting DHCP_OPTION97=0 which simply repeats the serial
  number 4 times.
* SELF_UPDATE. If SELF_UPDATE is set to 1 in the EEPROM configuration AND
  config.txt contains bootloader_update=1 then the bootloader will looking
  for pieeprom.upd and vl805.bin and apply these firmware files if 
  they are different to the current image, before doing a watchdog reset.
  This should make it easier to update the bootloader for network
  booted setups because an SD card is not required for recovery.bin.
  As usual, TFTP should only be used on private networks because the
  protocol is not secure against spoofing.
* recovery.bin. The beta recovery.bin will now display a green screen
  via HDMI if successful or red if a failure occurs.

2020-02-27 rpi-eeprom-update & firmware

* Remove the dependency check for the vl805 utility. This is deprecated
  and there is no 64-bit version. The file is still available in Github
  for anyone who wants to continue using USE_FLASHROM or create their
  own scripts.
* Add a stable firmware directory based on the latest beta release.
  Stable should be interpreted as feature-freeze releases. In this
  case the core network boot is stable enough for most scenarios
  and this de-risks adding new more experimental features in the
  beta folder.

2020-01-22 - vl805 00137ad

* Set the default/critical vl805 version to be 00137ad. This has the 
  same power savings as 0137ab but with fixes for USB webcams.

2020-01-17 - Git 5e86aac5f (BETA) RC4

* Handle DHCP option 0 - padding
* Fix SD card voltage detection

2020-01-14 - rpi-eeprom-config

* Fix padding calculation

2020-01-09 - Git df0ff18c (BETA) RC3

* Fix parsing of multiple menu entries in PXE options.
* Fix regression in IP address parsing

2019-12-03 - Git f0d7269d4 (BETA) RC2

* Fix handling of multiple menu options with TFTP Option43
* Ignore unsupported modes in BOOT_ORDER instead of stopping.

2019-11-18 - Git b6a7593d6 (BETA) RC1

First release candidate before this beta is moved to a stable release series.

* Avoid resetting TFTP prefix after retries or if start4.elf is not found.
* Add MAC_ADDRESS option which allows the OTP Ethernet MAC address to be
  overriden. An VideoCore firmware update will propagate this forced
  mac address to device-tree/cmdline in the near future.
* Various internal refactorings to prepare for USB MSD storage boot in
  the next beta-series.
* Enable high-speed mode for EMMC cards.

2019-10-17 - rpi-eeprom-update + recovery.bin

* New beta recovery.bin which can update the VLI EEPROM before
  start.elf is loaded. This is the recommended and default method
  because no USB devices will be in use at this stage.
* Extend the USE_FLASHROM configuration to use the vl805 tool
  to program the VL805 directly.
* Generate SHA256 checksums in .sig files for the bootloader and
  and VL805 images. This is required by the new recovery.bin to
  guard against corrupted files being flashed to the EEPROM(s).
* Various variable renames to distinguish between the bootloader
  and the VL805 images.

2019-10-16 - Git 18472066 (BETA)

• Ignore trailing characters when parsing in PXE boot menu option.
• Improve error handling with unformatted sd-cards.

2019-10-08 - Git 26dd3686c (BETA)

• TFTP now uses RFC2348 blksize option to get 1024 byte blocks if the server supports it.
• Fix DHCP handling of SI_ADDR
• TFTP_PREFIX and TFTP_PREFIX_STR options for mac-address or string literal prefix.
• Improved support for standard capacity and SDv1 cards.

2019-09-25 - Git 4d9824321 (BETA)

• Increase TFTP timeout to 30s as default & bootconf.txt
• Fix intermittent boot freeze/slowdown issue after loading start.elf
• Don't load start.elf during network boot if start4.elf exists but the download times out.

2019-09-23 - Git c67e8bb3 (BETA)

• Add support for network boot
• Configurable ordering for boot modes (BOOT_ORDER and SD/NET_BOOT retries)

2019-09-10 - Git f626c772

• Configure ethernet RGMII pins at power on. This is a minor change which which may improve reliability of ethernet for some users.

2019-09-05 - Git d8189ed4 - (BETA)

• Update SDRAM setup to reduce power consumption.

2019-07-15 - Git 514670a2

• Turn green LED activity off on halt.
• Pad embedded config file with spaces for easier editing by end users.
• Halt now behaves the same as earlier Pi models to improve power behavior at halt for HATs.
• WAKE_ON_GPIO now defaults to 1 in the EEPROM config file.
• POWER_OFF_ON_HALT setting added defaulting to zero. Set this to 1 to restore the behavior where 'sudo halt' powers off all PMIC output.
• If WAKE_ON_GPIO=1 then POWER_OFF_ON_HALT is ignored.
• Load start4db.elf / fixup4db.dat in preference to start_db.elf / fixup_db.dat on Pi4.
• Embed BUILD_TIMESTAMP in the EEPROM image to assist version checking.

2019-05-10 - Git d2402c53 (RC2.1)

• First production version.