Raspberry Pi needs a special software to work. Yes, operating system in important, but bootloader firmware is even more important. Without it, RPi would not be able to boot or support external devices.

From time to time, it’s worth to update the bootloader firmware to get new functions and fix bugs. This article is a tutorial on how to do it!

Bootloader version

The first thing we have to do, is to decide if we want to use Latest or Factory default bootloader. If you want new bootloader, choosing Latest makes a lot of sense.

First, let’s run raspi-config

sudo raspi-config

Select Advanced Options

Select Bootloader Version

And finally E1 Latest

Save and reboot

Bootloader update

The Raspbian OS will come with all the required packages installed. We only have to ensure we have the latest versions. So, let’s do apt upgrade

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

The bootloader firmware package is called rpi-eeprom-update

sudo rpi-eeprom-update

If there is a newer image available, output will look like this

What is left is to run rpi-eeprom-update with -a switch and apply it

sudo rpi-eeprom-update -a

Terminal output will look something like this

And that’s all, we successfully flashed the latest bootloader firmware to our Raspberry Pi. What’s left, is to reboot

sudo reboot now