Upgrading the Raspberry Pi to 16GB of RAM

[MadEDoctor]

 

Hello guys!
Probably some of you know me as the MadEDoctor from Youtube.
For those of you who don't know my channel and don't know what I am doing at the moment - Long story short I got my hands on a 16GB RAM chip that should be compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4 hardware.
But there is a problem I am facing... That is I am unable to boot any OS different from VMware (arm version) and RISC OS (that is pretty much useless).
When I try to boot Raspbian for example - It shows the rainbow square and then gets stuck on a completely black screen and it draws around 500mA...
I contacted Jeff Geerling with the hope he could help with this project. He wrote a post on the official RPi forum. As it seems the engineers of the Pi just don't want to help and even worse are lying that the hardware doesn't support 16GB of RAM...
Then one guy in the comments suggested I write here and ask for help... and here I am
I will be pretty thankful if somebody could help me with this project.

Here I provide datasheets for both the 16GB chip I got and the 8GB OEM one so you can compare them.
8GB - Micron D9ZCL | MT53E2G32D4NQ-046 WT:A :https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/3681594.pdf
16GB - Micron D8CBG | MT53E4G32D8CY-046 WT:C :https://4donline.ihs.com/images/VipMasterIC/IC/MICT/MICT-S-A0017462930/MICT-S-A0017465122-1.pdf?hkey=52A5661711E402568146F3353EA87419

And this is the video where I show what I have done to this point: https://youtu.be/vtym0TAWNto

 

[Werner]

moved

[JMCC]

19 hours ago, MadEDoctor said:

I am unable to boot any OS different from VMware (arm version) and RISC OS

Well, I don't even own a RPi, but here are some suggestions:

• You mention several OS'es, but not Armbian. Have you tried Armbian? If not, that would be the first thing to do, specially since you asked here :)
• In your video, you show RISC OS, and apparently it is running a armv7 version. Could it be that 32-bit ARM OS's are working, but 64-bit are not? If this is the issue, then maybe you can try to build 32-bit Armbian image and see if it works.
• It could also be a device tree issue. Maybe you can extract the DTB from some of the OS's that are working, and try to use it with an Armbian image.

[Michal Fita]

On 4/24/2023 at 9:28 PM, MadEDoctor said:

As it seems the engineers of the Pi just don't want to help and even worse are lying that the hardware doesn't support 16GB of RAM...

As both Raspberry Pi OS and Armbian use the same guts to boot, that includes RPi firmware I'd expect their firmware is unable to work with RAM chip other than original 8GB one and its potentially done on purpose. RPi hardware designs are proprietary and agreed with Broadcom under high pile of NDAs and other legally binding agreements.

 

I'm not saying it cannot be done, but you'd have to find someone able to reverse engineer the firmware and fix this for you, what may be legally grey area if not clear violation of the license (so you could be sued).