# Pi4 diagnostic screen

**URL:** <https://community.info-beamer.com/t/pi4-diagnostic-screen/865>\
**Category:** How-to and Tutorials\
**Created:** [April 19, 2020, 10:35am UTC](https://community.info-beamer.com/t/pi4-diagnostic-screen/865 "2020-04-19T10:35:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![infobeamer-fw](https://community.info-beamer.com/user_avatar/community.info-beamer.com/infobeamer-fw/32/3_2.png) [@infobeamer-fw](https://community.info-beamer.com/u/infobeamer-fw)\
**Post date:** [April 19, 2020, 10:35am UTC](https://community.info-beamer.com/t/pi4-diagnostic-screen/865/1 "2020-04-19T10:35:34Z")

</div>

# **Pi4 HDMI diagnostics screen**

The Pi4 has a writable [EEPROM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEPROM). This allows [fixing firmware problems and adding new features](https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/blob/master/firmware/release-notes.md) without releasing new hardware. This wasn’t possible with previous models and you can search for [“Known problems”](https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/net.md) for some examples of unfixable bugs in earlier models.

Recently the Pi4 firmware got a new feature named the **HDMI diagnostics screen** introduced by [this commit](https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/commit/f5f8e72f048d64bfa92408d074e27e37184583ca). The 640x480 output shows the Raspberry Pi4’s available memory as well as a bunch of other useful information once a Pi4 is unable to boot beyond the eeprom boot stage:

 ![image](https://community.info-beamer.com/uploads/default/original/1X/523c1c173b59c5cf534e6104373624ac16d90fec.jpeg)

| Line | Description |
| --- | --- |
| bootloader | The bootloader version and release date. |
| board | [Board revision](https://elinux.org/RPi_HardwareHistory#Board_Revision_History), device serial (in hexadecimal notation) and Ethernet MAC address. |
| boot | `mode`: Boot mode. 6 is SPI. `order` describes the boot order (see [BOOT\_ORDER](https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md)) as well as RSTS register content. `1020` in that case means cold boot (so power was added instead of rebooting from an installed OS). |
| SD CID | SD card identifier. Can be read from a running system in `/sys/block/mmcblk0/device/cid`. |
| part | Describes the detected partition table type (mbr) as well as detected partitions within the partition table (with type:offset). |
| fw | Filenames of startx and fixup.dat, if detected. |
| net | Link status (up/down) as well as IP configuration retrieved by DHCP: IP (`ip`), subnet (`sn`) and default gateway (`gw`) |
| tftp | Not sure. Probably configured TFTP server IP address. |

The QR code points to [https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/).

Contributions welcome. The eeprom update will end up in the next version of the info-beamer hosted OS. The current version in stable doesn’t have this feature yet.