First fully functional 64-bit OS for the Raspberry Pi 4 | Hacker News Reader

First fully functional 64-bit OS for the Raspberry Pi 4

balena.io

44 pointschrisys10 comments

This is good news. I had assumed that raspbian was 64 bit by now. It seems weird, since the Raspberry Pi v2.1 (second revision of Raspberry pi 2) launched with a 64-bit processor. I can't find a date for that launch, but the pi 3 launched in February 2016. The Pi foundation was forthcoming about Raspbian being 32 bit in the pi3 announcement article, but the timescale they laid out for making it 64 bit was "the next few months". I guess the reason anyone bothered porting to 64 bit is the fact that the pi4 has a 4GB of RAM option (you can't address the full 4GB with 32 bits).

> you can't address the full 4GB with 32 bits

Sure you can, you use page tables.

Exactly, didn't Arm add support for Large Physical Address Extension (LPAE) back in the v7 days?

Debian arm64 works fine on the Raspberry Pi 3 (https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi). The Pi 4 changed the boot sequence so that Debian doesn’t work any more, making this the first 64-bit OS for the Pi 4.

They didn't say it is the first 64bit OS that runs on the Pi 4. The key phrase is "fully functional" which has no definitive definition. It's just some clickbait, marketing jargon.

The first? Plan 9 (9front to be specific) had support for it for a few weeks now.

> All these fixes were pushed upstream and are available in the main Raspberry Pi Linux repository.

Well that's just highly misleading. "upstream" in this case refers to the outdated downstream kernel provided by the RPi foundation. Mainline does not have support for brcmstb at all current.y

That's an upstream, and it is defined right afterwards:

> and are available in the main Raspberry Pi Linux repository

Hardly misleading. It clearly says "Raspberry Pi" and it doesn't say "main Linux repository". They could've added the word 'kernel' but then again I suppose it is a general Raspberry Pi git repo. Merging the Raspberry Pi Linux kernel repo with Torvalds' mainline isn't their responsibility.

That's not to say this whole thing isn't an advertisement though. This whole balenaOS and balenaCloud thing is some kind of frontend for Docker and the like, but have you seen the Pricing?

I'll just patiently wait for Raspbian Aarch64/ARM64 version instead :)

It already is a huge improvement. So when it goes full 64 bit and all the memory is accessible, it'll give a second bump to that experience of improvement.

There are already builds of Ubuntu 64bit that are very solid... https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-ubuntu-server-desk...

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