Install “rpi-eeprom” (older versions of Raspberry Pi OS / Raspbian)
Newer versions of Raspberry Pi OS come with this utility already but if you are upgrading/have upgraded from an older version you may not have it in some cases. We can install it with the following commands:
1 2 3 | sudo apt update sudo apt full-upgrade sudo apt install rpi-eeprom |
Once the utility is installed Raspberry Pi OS will check at boot whether there are any critical bootloader firmware updates for your Pi.
Checking for Updates Manually
If you are like me and don’t want to wait around for Raspberry Pi OS to decide whether do these updates there is a command to check for updates manually:
1 | sudo rpi-eeprom-update |
You will see output like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 | *** UPDATE AVAILABLE *** BOOTLOADER: update available CURRENT: Thu 10 Mar 11:57:12 UTC 2022 (1646913432) LATEST: Thu 10 Mar 11:57:12 UTC 2022 (1646913432) RELEASE: stable (/lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/stable) Use raspi-config to change the release. VL805_FW: Using bootloader EEPROM VL805: up to date CURRENT: 000138a1 LATEST: 000138a1 |
If the firmware isn’t up to date it will indicate an update is required like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 | *** UPDATE AVAILABLE *** BOOTLOADER: update available CURRENT: Thu 10 Mar 11:57:12 UTC 2022 (1646913432) LATEST: Tue 26 Apr 10:24:28 UTC 2022 (1650968668) RELEASE: stable (/lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/stable) Use raspi-config to change the release. VL805_FW: Using bootloader EEPROM VL805: up to date CURRENT: 000138a1 LATEST: 000138a1 |
We now can see that there is updated firmware for our device. To install this update we will use the -a switch as well as the -d switch (which means to check the bootloader):
1 | sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -a |
If there were updates available your output should look like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 | *** INSTALLING EEPROM UPDATES *** BOOTLOADER: update available CURRENT: Thu 10 Mar 11:57:12 UTC 2022 (1646913432) LATEST: Tue 26 Apr 10:24:28 UTC 2022 (1650968668) RELEASE: stable (/lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/stable) Use raspi-config to change the release. VL805_FW: Using bootloader EEPROM VL805: up to date CURRENT: 000138a1 LATEST: 000138a1 CURRENT: Thu 10 Mar 11:57:12 UTC 2022 (1646913432) UPDATE: Tue 26 Apr 10:24:28 UTC 2022 (1650968668) BOOTFS: /boot EEPROM updates pending. Please reboot to apply the update. To cancel a pending update run "sudo rpi-eeprom-update -r". |
Now reboot the Raspberry PI with sudo reboot and re-run sudo rpi-eeprom-update to confirm that all is up to date.