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I think people forget what it was designed for. It was to reboot IT education which was (is) badly floundering. It's success was so good it started to be used i

I think people forget what it was designed for. It was to reboot IT education which was (is) badly floundering. It's success was so good it started to be used in small commercial applications. The Foundation tried to help fill this gap in the market with the compute module. Even though there is a lot of open source features the use of the Broadcom chipset was probably driven by cost as keeping the Pi price down was a factor. If a fully open source and open document solution is required perhaps the Pi isn't the right choice but then that was never it's original goal.

systemvoltage 6y ago
No doubt, RPi has been a boon to the world and the popularity speaks for itself.
paulmd 6y ago
I can't imagine having to sysadmin a bunch of raspberry pis in a serious "production" setting with all the reliability problems they have, that would be godawful, you'd go through a brace of SD cards every month
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Why? I supported 40 of them (rpi 3) as remote serial hosts and custom reboot/repower for a QA farm. Not a single one failed and don't think I had a single issue during that whole time. As far as I know it's still going just fine. It was a cheap and dependable solution. 99% of the SD card issues go away when you don't cheap out and don't go cheap. get a large card that is 32GB plus from a respectable vendor. That's not the rpi's fault on the failures, it's the cheap ass SD cards that people buy.
  - pishpash 6y ago
    It is the fault of Pi hardware when it still refuses to provide a hardware shutdown button for proper file system unmounts, after all these years.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      Dependence on SD Cards and lack of orderly shutdown was what caused my company to not go with the Raspberry Pi. Even then we have back up power to allow the system time to shutdown.
      - qubex 6y ago
        Considering it was designed for IT teaching and not for embedded use, I cannot fathom why your company and many others contemplate using it in such a capacity.
    - gorgoiler 6y ago
      Machines no longer degrade when the power is yanked. Any corruption caused by a mid-write devoltage event is handled gracefully by whatever modern filesystem of choice you are using, is it not? Is there some more fundamental hardware damage that occurs when USB devices are unplugged without prior warning to the device itself?
      - throwaway8941 6y ago
        It does, when your crappy hardware doesn't lie to the kernel. Go take a look at the amount of unrecoverable FS corruption discussions at LKML. It still happens relatively frequently, and is almost always caused by shitty hardware ignoring fsync and lying to the filesystem. SD cards and cheap SSDs are especially terrible in this regard (that's why I refuse to buy anything except from the most respected vendors, and they still have their issues). Many devices don't even report checksum mismatches on read requests and simply return garbage data, and most filesystems don't notice it (because they don't implement a data integrity checking mechanism of their own)
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        Because of large erase blocks, it's unavoidable that a flash device needs to involve some kind of very careful bookkeeping and sector-shifting to safely handle power loss during writes. Otherwise it could lose a big chunk of sectors unrelated to what you were actually writing, and that's not something a filesystem can paper over. I barely trust a proper SSD controller to do this, let alone whatever cheap thing is in an SD card or flash drive.
- shakna 6y ago
  I can talk to managing Pis in an educational setting, and honestly, it is less bad than expected. (Disclaimer: No longer a school sysadmin. But was for a number of years.) First some comparisons. Kids are seriously rough on technology. We had a fleet of about three hundred laptops, two hundred iPads, and two hundred Pis in the junior school. In a year, we'd end up with about a hundred laptop screen replacements, two hundred keyboard replacements and about a hundred hard drive replacements. About ten "I accidentally dropped the laptop in the river"s. We'd cycle the laptop out for a brand new one at four years, if it survived. In the same year, about sixty iPad screen replacements, ten or so battery replacements, and twenty or so river dunkings. Only ever had one hard drive failure, apart from water damage, but the iPads were on a short two-year upgrade cycle. The Pis were used for the robotics clubs (optional) and programming (compulsary). Pis aren't great for kids and robotics due to lack of protection on the pins for dumb mistakes. We had about twenty fizzle the mysterious smoke every year. About twenty more than experienced SD card failure in the year, usually related to yanking a power cord, not direct write failure. We also had a couple students a year who snapped theirs in half. All in all, the cost of maintaining the Pi fleet was negligible besides the rest.
  - glenneroo 6y ago
    I've snapped/bent a few microSD cards myself trying to remove them from "exotic" cases, both times in hasty situations (interactive art shows). I've learned to slowly remove them while not exerting any vertical pressure when it's still halfway inside the Pi - just keep trying to slide the card out while using fingernails to catch the bump on the end.
    - shakna 6y ago
      Ah, sorry. When I said "kids snapped theirs in half", I wasn't referring to the SD card. I was referring to the Pi itself. Kids can be monstrous when it comes to technology.
  - qubex 6y ago
    How on earth do you get a “hard-drive failure” on an iPad?!
- stedaniels 6y ago
  If you avoid the extremely common mistake of mounting the SD card RW instead of RO then Pi problems are negligible.
- trashcan 6y ago
  Raspberry Pis are actually very reliable if you don't use the cheapest possible power supply and SD card from Amazon. I have several that have years of uptime. That said, I agree kids are rough on any technology.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Actually the problem is with unexpected shutdowns so logically if you’re having years of uptime you wouldn’t be seeing these issues.
joezydeco 6y ago
I’m tired of pointing this out. The reply is consistently “So what? It’s my cheap Linux SBC now and until you can find something better for $40, go away.” I‘be been booting off of eMMC on an A7 for years now. I don’t get any of this anymore.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  It has a huge support community that is very friendly, that's as valuable as anything.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  I too, am tired of giving that reply - I don't know why the issue must be continually raised on every Pi article; it's a little patronizing ("Oh, those poor Pi users don't know any better"), and that grates when you have researched and ended up with the Pi as the best-fit. Both things are true - yes the Pi is not the most robust SBC on the market, but the Pi also offers the best value for money hobbyists and tinkerers. You (generalized) and I have completely different priorities and we will accept very different trade-offs: price is important to me - reliability, not as much. I would rather drop $40 on an SBC that may or may not kill my $5-$15 SD card in the next few months than spend >$100 on a rock-solid eMMC-/CF-based one. Most of Pi users are hobbyists who are not running critical code, if it fails they will fix it next weekend. Maybe. If the pros fail to understand that the needs of hobbyists are different, then this back-and-forth will never cease.
  - joezydeco 6y ago
    I don’t even address hobbyists. Let them do what they want. I’m taking about the people I encounter that are trying to use an RPi as an off-the-shelf compute solution for a production device.
    - ksaj 6y ago
      I'm always amused and simultaneously annoyed by those ads about Raspberry Pi "killers" that are X amount faster or whatever, but they never get around to pointing out the price factor. They nearly always start at double the price. I'd only expect them to outperform the Raspberry Pi if they are double the price. The Raspberry Pi is what it is, and is in every way brilliant for it. If you want X amount faster, you pay for that. That's not a Raspberry Pi killer. It's a different category altogether. Those SBCs cost more, and therefore you get more. If you need that, Raspberry Pi isn't what you need. But if you are within the group that Raspberry Pi caters to, it's hard to find better. It's like saying the new electric Harley Davidson motorcycle is an e-bike killer. Of course it's faster and more powerful and has more this and that more features. It costs more. It's just not the same thing. PS: The new Rpi 4 with lots of RAM is certainly getting there. I actually use one as my desktop even though I have far more powerful equipment in my studio.
varispeed 6y ago
How exactly does it help IT education and what was wrong with it that it needed a "reboot"?
- 0xCMP 6y ago
  The original idea was giving kids a device they could just connect into a TV (no need to buy a new screen) and learn by screwing up like ~"we all did when computers were simpler." iPads, iPhones, Windows, etc. They're expensive and complicated. Kids can't take the family computer and screw up installing linux 3 times while Mom needs to do something for work. A $25 computer is something a family could easily afford and so could school districts.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    We had computers at school, but we didn't have great teachers. Wouldn't be better if school spent money on good specialists willing to share their knowledge or at least make sure kids watch certain channels on YouTube that have wealth of knowledge? If parents won't spend $200 on a computer to help their children get better future, their certainly won't spend $25. I bet they wouldn't even treat this seriously.
- jankiehodgpodge 6y ago
  Most kids only experience computers through a smart phone and a collection of social media apps.
peterkelly 6y ago
It's the standard pattern where someone comes along and says "hey, we made this thing which does X pretty well for a good price". Then someone else comes along and say "we wanted to use it for Y, but it's not good at that, therefore the thing itself is bad, and it's creators should have focused on making it good at Y instead".
- fsflover 6y ago
  AFAIK, Raspberry Pi was, among other goals, was designed to help poor students learn software and hardware. I am not sure how one can do this with such a huge proprietary blob.

systemvoltage 6y ago

No doubt, RPi has been a boon to the world and the popularity speaks for itself.

paulmd 6y ago

I can't imagine having to sysadmin a bunch of raspberry pis in a serious "production" setting with all the reliability problems they have, that would be godawful, you'd go through a brace of SD cards every month

stjohnswarts 6y ago
Why? I supported 40 of them (rpi 3) as remote serial hosts and custom reboot/repower for a QA farm. Not a single one failed and don't think I had a single issue during that whole time. As far as I know it's still going just fine. It was a cheap and dependable solution. 99% of the SD card issues go away when you don't cheap out and don't go cheap. get a large card that is 32GB plus from a respectable vendor. That's not the rpi's fault on the failures, it's the cheap ass SD cards that people buy.
- pishpash 6y ago
  It is the fault of Pi hardware when it still refuses to provide a hardware shutdown button for proper file system unmounts, after all these years.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    Dependence on SD Cards and lack of orderly shutdown was what caused my company to not go with the Raspberry Pi. Even then we have back up power to allow the system time to shutdown.
    - qubex 6y ago
      Considering it was designed for IT teaching and not for embedded use, I cannot fathom why your company and many others contemplate using it in such a capacity.
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    Machines no longer degrade when the power is yanked. Any corruption caused by a mid-write devoltage event is handled gracefully by whatever modern filesystem of choice you are using, is it not? Is there some more fundamental hardware damage that occurs when USB devices are unplugged without prior warning to the device itself?
    - throwaway8941 6y ago
      It does, when your crappy hardware doesn't lie to the kernel. Go take a look at the amount of unrecoverable FS corruption discussions at LKML. It still happens relatively frequently, and is almost always caused by shitty hardware ignoring fsync and lying to the filesystem. SD cards and cheap SSDs are especially terrible in this regard (that's why I refuse to buy anything except from the most respected vendors, and they still have their issues). Many devices don't even report checksum mismatches on read requests and simply return garbage data, and most filesystems don't notice it (because they don't implement a data integrity checking mechanism of their own)
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Because of large erase blocks, it's unavoidable that a flash device needs to involve some kind of very careful bookkeeping and sector-shifting to safely handle power loss during writes. Otherwise it could lose a big chunk of sectors unrelated to what you were actually writing, and that's not something a filesystem can paper over. I barely trust a proper SSD controller to do this, let alone whatever cheap thing is in an SD card or flash drive.
shakna 6y ago
I can talk to managing Pis in an educational setting, and honestly, it is less bad than expected. (Disclaimer: No longer a school sysadmin. But was for a number of years.) First some comparisons. Kids are seriously rough on technology. We had a fleet of about three hundred laptops, two hundred iPads, and two hundred Pis in the junior school. In a year, we'd end up with about a hundred laptop screen replacements, two hundred keyboard replacements and about a hundred hard drive replacements. About ten "I accidentally dropped the laptop in the river"s. We'd cycle the laptop out for a brand new one at four years, if it survived. In the same year, about sixty iPad screen replacements, ten or so battery replacements, and twenty or so river dunkings. Only ever had one hard drive failure, apart from water damage, but the iPads were on a short two-year upgrade cycle. The Pis were used for the robotics clubs (optional) and programming (compulsary). Pis aren't great for kids and robotics due to lack of protection on the pins for dumb mistakes. We had about twenty fizzle the mysterious smoke every year. About twenty more than experienced SD card failure in the year, usually related to yanking a power cord, not direct write failure. We also had a couple students a year who snapped theirs in half. All in all, the cost of maintaining the Pi fleet was negligible besides the rest.
- glenneroo 6y ago
  I've snapped/bent a few microSD cards myself trying to remove them from "exotic" cases, both times in hasty situations (interactive art shows). I've learned to slowly remove them while not exerting any vertical pressure when it's still halfway inside the Pi - just keep trying to slide the card out while using fingernails to catch the bump on the end.
  - shakna 6y ago
    Ah, sorry. When I said "kids snapped theirs in half", I wasn't referring to the SD card. I was referring to the Pi itself. Kids can be monstrous when it comes to technology.
- qubex 6y ago
  How on earth do you get a “hard-drive failure” on an iPad?!
stedaniels 6y ago
If you avoid the extremely common mistake of mounting the SD card RW instead of RO then Pi problems are negligible.
trashcan 6y ago
Raspberry Pis are actually very reliable if you don't use the cheapest possible power supply and SD card from Amazon. I have several that have years of uptime. That said, I agree kids are rough on any technology.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Actually the problem is with unexpected shutdowns so logically if you’re having years of uptime you wouldn’t be seeing these issues.

joezydeco 6y ago

I’m tired of pointing this out. The reply is consistently “So what? It’s my cheap Linux SBC now and until you can find something better for $40, go away.” I‘be been booting off of eMMC on an A7 for years now. I don’t get any of this anymore.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
It has a huge support community that is very friendly, that's as valuable as anything.
sangnoir 6y ago
I too, am tired of giving that reply - I don't know why the issue must be continually raised on every Pi article; it's a little patronizing ("Oh, those poor Pi users don't know any better"), and that grates when you have researched and ended up with the Pi as the best-fit. Both things are true - yes the Pi is not the most robust SBC on the market, but the Pi also offers the best value for money hobbyists and tinkerers. You (generalized) and I have completely different priorities and we will accept very different trade-offs: price is important to me - reliability, not as much. I would rather drop $40 on an SBC that may or may not kill my $5-$15 SD card in the next few months than spend >$100 on a rock-solid eMMC-/CF-based one. Most of Pi users are hobbyists who are not running critical code, if it fails they will fix it next weekend. Maybe. If the pros fail to understand that the needs of hobbyists are different, then this back-and-forth will never cease.
- joezydeco 6y ago
  I don’t even address hobbyists. Let them do what they want. I’m taking about the people I encounter that are trying to use an RPi as an off-the-shelf compute solution for a production device.
  - ksaj 6y ago
    I'm always amused and simultaneously annoyed by those ads about Raspberry Pi "killers" that are X amount faster or whatever, but they never get around to pointing out the price factor. They nearly always start at double the price. I'd only expect them to outperform the Raspberry Pi if they are double the price. The Raspberry Pi is what it is, and is in every way brilliant for it. If you want X amount faster, you pay for that. That's not a Raspberry Pi killer. It's a different category altogether. Those SBCs cost more, and therefore you get more. If you need that, Raspberry Pi isn't what you need. But if you are within the group that Raspberry Pi caters to, it's hard to find better. It's like saying the new electric Harley Davidson motorcycle is an e-bike killer. Of course it's faster and more powerful and has more this and that more features. It costs more. It's just not the same thing. PS: The new Rpi 4 with lots of RAM is certainly getting there. I actually use one as my desktop even though I have far more powerful equipment in my studio.

varispeed 6y ago

How exactly does it help IT education and what was wrong with it that it needed a "reboot"?

0xCMP 6y ago
The original idea was giving kids a device they could just connect into a TV (no need to buy a new screen) and learn by screwing up like ~"we all did when computers were simpler." iPads, iPhones, Windows, etc. They're expensive and complicated. Kids can't take the family computer and screw up installing linux 3 times while Mom needs to do something for work. A $25 computer is something a family could easily afford and so could school districts.
- varispeed 6y ago
  We had computers at school, but we didn't have great teachers. Wouldn't be better if school spent money on good specialists willing to share their knowledge or at least make sure kids watch certain channels on YouTube that have wealth of knowledge? If parents won't spend $200 on a computer to help their children get better future, their certainly won't spend $25. I bet they wouldn't even treat this seriously.
jankiehodgpodge 6y ago
Most kids only experience computers through a smart phone and a collection of social media apps.

peterkelly 6y ago

It's the standard pattern where someone comes along and says "hey, we made this thing which does X pretty well for a good price". Then someone else comes along and say "we wanted to use it for Y, but it's not good at that, therefore the thing itself is bad, and it's creators should have focused on making it good at Y instead".

fsflover 6y ago
AFAIK, Raspberry Pi was, among other goals, was designed to help poor students learn software and hardware. I am not sure how one can do this with such a huge proprietary blob.