Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI Firmware Images

Summary

This repository contains installable builds of the official EDK2 Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI firmware.

Initial Notice

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING:
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• Ethernet networking support in Linux requires a recent enough kernel (version 5.7 or later)

• SD or wireless support in Linux also requires a recent enough kernel (version 5.12 or later).
  Still, your mileage may vary as to whether these peripherals will actually be usable.

• Many drivers (GPIO, VPU, etc) are still likely to be missing from your OS, and will have to be provided by a third party. Please do not ask for them here, as they fall outside of the scope of this project.

• A 3 GB RAM limit is enforced by default, even if you are using a Raspberry Pi 4 model that has 4 GB or 8 GB of RAM, on account that the OS must patch DMA access, to work around a hardware bug that is present in the Broadcom SoC.
  For Linux this usually translates to using a recent kernel (version 5.8 or later) and for Windows this requires the installation of a filter driver.
  If you are running an OS that has been adequately patched, you can disable the 3 GB limit by going to Device Manager → Raspberry Pi Configuration → Advanced Settings in the UEFI settings.

• This firmware is built from the official EDK2 repository.

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Installation

• Download the latest archive from the Releases repository.

• Create an SD card or a USB drive, with at least one partition (it can be a regular partition or an ESP) and format it to FAT16 or FAT32.

  Note: Booting from USB or from ESP requires a recent-enough version of the Pi EEPROM (as well as a recent version of the UEFI firmware). If you are using the latest UEFI firmware and find that booting from USB or from ESP doesn't work, please visit https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/releases to update your EEPROM.

• Extract all the files from the archive onto the partition you created above.
  Note that outside of this Readme.md, which you can safely remove, you should not change the names of the extracted files and directories.

Usage

Insert the SD card/plug the USB drive and power up your Raspberry Pi. You should see a multicoloured screen (which indicates that the CPU-embedded bootloader is reading the data from the SD/USB partition) and then the Raspberry Pi black and white logo once the UEFI firmware is ready.

At this stage, you can press Esc to enter the firmware setup, F1 to launch the UEFI Shell, or, provided you also have an UEFI bootloader on the SD card or on a USB drive in efi/boot/bootaa64.efi, you can let the UEFI system run that (which will be the default if no action is taken).

Additional Notes

The firmware provided in the zip archive is the RELEASE version but you can also find a DEBUG build of the firmware in the GitHub CI artifacts.

The provided firmwares should be able to auto-detect the UART being used (PL011 or mini UART) according to whether config.txt contains the relevant overlay or not. The default baudrate for serial I/O is 115200 and the console device to use under Linux is either /dev/ttyAMA0 when using PL011 or /dev/ttyS0 when using miniUART.

At the moment, the published firmwares default to enforcing ACPI as well as a 3 GB RAM limit, which is done to ensure Linux boot. These settings can be changed by going to Device Manager → Raspberry Pi Configuration → Advanced Configuration.

Please visit https://rpi4-uefi.dev/ for more information.

License

The firmware (RPI_EFI.fd) is licensed under the current EDK2 license, which is BSD-2-Clause-Patent.

The other files from the zip archives are licensed under the terms described in the Raspberry Pi boot files README.

The binary blobs in the firmware/ directory are licensed under the Cypress wireless driver license that is found there.