The Ethernet chip is a new one tho - maybe it's a little less terrible? (No idea...

Alupis · on July 14, 2014

The Ethernet speeds are limited by both the USB bus it's riding on, as well as the slow CPU processing power.

Although, for most of my projects so far, it's been plenty fast.

tlrobinson · on July 14, 2014

Any recommendations for similar small/cheap devices with better Ethernet?

fanf2 · on July 15, 2014

Have a look at the Beaglebone Black.

jedahan · on July 14, 2014

the ethernet chip seems to just be the 4 usb-port version instead of the 2 usb-port version.

kephra · on July 14, 2014

But as far as I read, the PI can still not boot over Ethernet, which is a requirement for me to boot into backup cycle (Installation = Restore), and it still can not wakeup on LAN.

duskwuff · on July 14, 2014

If you load U-Boot onto an SD card, the rPi can be configured to use that to boot over Ethernet. It's not a completely "pure" network boot, but that's impossible given the hardware. (There's simply nowhere for a bootloader to live besides the SD card.)

Alupis · on July 15, 2014

You need some sort of bootloader, even in a traditional PXE boot scenario... it's just that your BIOS hands off to the bootloader on your onboard PXE chip instead of to your OS's bootloader, etc. So, it's chain-booting no matter how you slice it.

You can setup your SD card to have U-Boot and not much else... just what's necessary for U-Boot to, well, boot. Then it takes over and does it's network boot of your full OS. So you can get a sort-of PXE boot setup.