Technology Miraj Islam September 28, 2026 0 Comments

‘Don’t waste your time’: Raspberry Pi expert reveals users basically can’t change RAM chips for repairs or upgrades

The Raspberry Pi firmware has rejected changes to RAM capacity on Pi 5 family boards since at least September 2024, something that was formally confirmed by a company engineer in June 2026.
The company claims this is intentional: a block kills profits when reselling 2GB boards equipped with larger, untested chips as 8GB models, preventing smuggling with substandard components that causes quality control issues.
A second Raspberry Pi engineer has stated that fixes for the same parts still work and that an older bootloader can be installed on the devices to bypass verification altogether.

Raspberry Pi has spent two years locking its newer boards to the memory capacity they came out of the factory with to prevent resellers and bootleggers from hoarding their cheaper, low-memory options for third-party upgrades.

At a time when shortages are driving the supply and price of most components with integrated memory, one of Raspberry Pi’s engineers has an unusually blunt message for anyone looking to solder on a larger chip: “don’t waste your time trying, it won’t work.”

The line comes from Phil Elwell, who posts on the official Raspberry Pi forums as PhilE and is identified as the company’s lead software engineer, making it essentially an official take on the matter.

A policy implemented before the RAM apocalypse began

The confirmation given by Elwell is based on the company implementing hardware locks in two different ways: not only are Raspberry Pi models locked to the memory size they ship with, but in certain cases, a repair of the same part; essentially a memory swap to replace a faulty module may not work thanks to other protections enabled on the device.

Elwell responded to a repair technician who attempted to upgrade a 2GB Compute Module 5 to 4GB, first with a replacement chip and then with one removed from a working 4GB donor module. Each time, the system saw only 2GB, even after the technician adjusted the resistor the board uses to indicate memory size and tested flash chips with older firmware.

The reason given here centers on the fact that Raspberry Pi presents itself as an entity that competitively purchases memory in the market, passing savings on to consumers, while allowing for shortfalls during certain windows.

Plus, the fact that Raspberry Pi Holdings doesn’t want to get bogged down by a dearth of inferior memory configuration options and acting as a support channel for complaints about unofficial memory mods, many of which are doomed to fail or act erratically thanks to the use of untested memory.

It’s hard to argue with the rationale from a business perspective, but they could have handled it better. The check was submitted in bootloader 2024-09-23, posted to GitHub on September 25, 2024, and its release notes say: “Minor updates to align with manufacturer testing.” It doesn’t mention memory checks and the first official confirmation we received comes from a forum almost 21 months later.

While blocking was in play before the current memory crisis, it complicates matters when replacement units are prohibitively expensive, especially for high-end (read: high memory) Raspberry Pi SKUs.

YouTuber Jeff Geerling, who covered this, pointed out a workaround: you could flash an older bootloader (v2024.09.10-2712) that doesn’t have this memory check. However, doing this essentially excludes the Raspberry Pi from future firmware updates that include a host of fixes and security patches, which is a heavy trade-off.

The manufacturers could have handled this better, as he says: the Raspberry Pi could simply override a single, non-inline memory bit, how electronic fuses work in modern electronics and consoles that would be written the moment the Pi detected a third-party module.

Ironically, the memory shortage has exacerbated the situation, making it likely that even more people will try to find a cheaper way to get a memory upgrade, even as the Raspberry Pi Foundation passes memory costs on to end users, which would make the business extremely lucrative if the lock didn’t exist, potentially generating thousands of complaints on its forums from users attempting such a mod or having been tricked into purchasing a unit with modified memory from the start.

However, whether a quiet firmware change, confirmed 21 months later in a forum response, was the right approach for a company whose brand was built on tinkering is a story for another day.