On 10/12/2025 13:13, Daniel James wrote:

On 09/12/2025 19:07, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

These might as well be EEprom really! What else is an SD card?

An EEPROM is can be written/erased one byte at a time.

An SD card uses flash memory that can only be written in blocks, and can only be erased in pages (which are typically larger than write-blocks).

Flash is typically many times cheaper than EEPROM, byte for byte, and
its block-structured nature is well suited for mass storage applications whose filesystems are block-oriented anyway.

What I meant was that (tongue in cheek) the functionality was identical.
User reprogrammable non volatile storage

Mind you that goes for HD/SSDs as well...

--
?The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that
the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

- Bertrand Russell



--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 09/12/2025 19:07, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

These might as well be EEprom really! What else is an SD card?

An EEPROM is can be written/erased one byte at a time.

An SD card uses flash memory that can only be written in blocks, and can
only be erased in pages (which are typically larger than write-blocks).

Flash is typically many times cheaper than EEPROM, byte for byte, and
its block-structured nature is well suited for mass storage applications
whose filesystems are block-oriented anyway.

--
Cheers,
Daniel.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 09/12/2025 20:54, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 09/12/2025 18:58, Knute Johnson wrote:

On 12/9/25 12:52, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

Knute Johnson <knute2025@585ranch.com> wrote:

On 12/9/25 10:29, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

My Pi2 v1.1 running Trixie just announced that updates are availalbe. >>>>>> However, they're eeprom updates. To my knowldge a Pi2 has no eeprom. >>>>>> Still, if I let the updater run it makes a big ceremony of downloading >>>>>> and installing _something_.

What's going on?

Thanks for reading, apologies for the recent flood of questions.... >>>>>>
bob prohaska

Only Pi4 and Pi5s have eeprom.ÿ But all get the update so that if you >>>>> put that uSD card in a Pi4 or a Pi5 it will update it.

Since there's no eeprom on the Pi2 does the update downloaded and
stashed somewhere on the microSD? Or is it installed to /dev/null ?

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

It gets stashed on the card somewhere.

IIRC there is a bunch of machine level stuff in the FAT partition -
mounts as /boot/firmware - in a live SD situation

These might as well be EEprom really! What else is an SD card?

That's a happy thought but I'm skeptical. If it were true I'd have
a lot less trouble booting from USB drives 8-)

Well those perform the same function as the SD card on a Pi.

I think the issue is that the - ahem *BIOS* - on a Pi is more primitive
than a DOS PC used to be.

It just grabs a FAT formatted storage device and looks for a specific
bunch of files there and those are the *real* bios.

Isn't that lost in the history of the chips used being designed for
Smart TVs?


--
?A leader is best When people barely know he exists. Of a good leader,
who talks little,When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,They will say,
?We did this ourselves.?

? Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)