Raspberry Pi has confirmed its boards are firmware-locked to their factory RAM configuration, closing off a popular DIY upgrade path. The disclosure came from Phil E, a Raspberry Pi engineer and forum moderator, responding to a user who couldn't get a newly soldered-in 4 GB chip to register on a Compute Module 5. Apparently, the lock isn't new. According to the forum thread, it has been in place for some time, just not spelled out this plainly before. The lockdown reportedly dates back to late 2024, before this year's RAM price surge, so it's not a reaction to the current memory crunch either.

That part obviously doesn't sit well with the repair and modding crowd, a community Raspberry Pi has usually supported. Phil E explained the reasoning candidly. Apparently, some resellers were buying boards with cheaper RAM, swapping in higher-capacity chips "of dubious origin," and reselling them as factory 8 GB units. Those boards were never tested by Raspberry Pi, so when buyers ended up with unreliable hardware, support headaches landed on the company. Locking devices to their original RAM size removes that incentive, Phil E said. The firmware also reads other device attributes tied to the RAM part, so even a same-capacity swap from another board may not work, thus complicating repairs. It seems the tinkerer culture Raspberry Pi built its reputation on has unfortunately run into a hardware lock.