Raspberry Pi’s Tom Dewey released today the first update to the major Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0 series of this cross-platform utility for installing Raspberry Pi OS and other operating systems to a microSD card.

You would think that Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.2 is a small update that fixes some bugs and other issues discovered in the initial Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0 release, but, in fact, it’s a huge release adding lots of new features like direct I/O bypass to reduce memory pressure during writes.

This release also adds a zero-copy ring buffer for data transfer between download and write threads to reduce CPU overhead, an asynchronous cache file writer to overlap download and disk I/O operations, sequential read hints during verification for better prefetching, and a performance data analysis tool for debugging slow writes.