# The Dark Side of the Raspberry Pi

The Dark Side of the Raspberry Pi October 10, 2019 | Raspberry Pi I like my new Raspberry Pi 4, but let’s be honest, it has some fundamental flaws. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not primarily a Linux board. The real, low-level operating system running on every Raspberry Pi is ThreadX, a proprietary, closed-source real-time kernel. Popular Linux distributions like Raspbian are, architecturally speaking, second-class citizens that run on top of this hidden firmware layer. This core firmware is closed source and stored on an EEPROM chip, which can be updated with a utility called rpi-eepro

https://bubelov.com/blog/2019/dark-side-of-raspberry-pi/

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Canonical URL: https://qwibbit.com/q31735

Created: 2026-10-28T23:29:23.798878+00:00

Last edited: 2026-10-28T23:29:23.798878+00:00

Board: 3

Origin: Syndicated

Original source: https://bubelov.com/blog/2019/dark-side-of-raspberry-pi/