Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) 64 bit beta | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) 64 bit beta

raspberrypi.org

105 pointsgeerlingguy26 comments

Debian aarch64 has been working well on the Raspberry Pi for a while now. Good to see Raspbian catching up.

Yeah I've seen more and more people switching to Ubuntu's 64 bit build just because there are a lot more arm64-compatible things floating around now than armv7. I'll be happy to not have to spend so much time compiling things for the 32-bit OS!

Yep -- I just bought a Raspberry Pi 4 this past weekend and was surprised to learn that .NET Core wasn't supported until I realized Raspbian was 32-bit. I installed Ubuntu/arm64 and while I didn't realize it was a non-GUI OS that was fine and I was able to put .NET Core 3.1 and some small apps on it and all is well.

Uh - I've been using Raspbian + .NET Core for ages. Works fine.

pi@pi:~ $ uname -m

armv7l

Perhaps this is too much of a tangent, but why do people feel the need to type out "Uh" or "Um" in internet discussions? Are they trying to mimic the way they speak offline, because if so, it doesn't come across particularly well.

It frames the intent of what they are about to "say". Before reading the technical details I already know that the author has a contrasting experience.

Nice I might have to check Ubuntu out for the Pi. I was also debating going the openSUSE route.

are there any disadvantages to using debian aarch64 vs raspbian?

I would prefer to be on the base distro for several reasons (though mainly prompt security updates)

The big disadvantage to me is firmware updating. You have to have a second SD card that boots rasbian just to perform the update.

IIRC the firmware is in a separate repository from the rest of raspbian. You can simply add it to your debian sources.list.

> Raspberry Pi 4 model B can drive two 4K monitors

Finally, the Year of Linux Desktop has arrived.

Is there a noticeable performance benefit with RPi at 64bit?

There's the noticeable performance benefit that you can actually use the 8GB of RAM on the new model.

There is an 8GB model? I thought the largest was 4GB (which I have)?

Hot off the presses - https://www.pcmag.com/news/8gb-raspberry-pi-4-launches-for-7...

Supposedly, yes. https://medium.com/@matteocroce/why-you-should-run-a-64-bit-...

If real-world is anything like the graphs, it will be pretty good upgrade.

I've been doing a few more informal tests (haven't had time to do a 1-2 day burn-in), and I've seen most CPU-intense operations are 3-5% faster (some more so) on the 64-bit release.

Proper ARM SBCL with threads yay

Sweet, didn't think of this as one of the potential upgrades. I just installed Manjaro ARM (64-bit) on mine yesterday, along with SBCL. Sure enough, :SB-THREAD is there! Thanks for the tip.

Finally! Does this mean ArchLinuxARM (ALARM) will also support 64 bits on RPi 4 soon?

Its ben there unofficially for a while: https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=14096

I’m strongly thinking of just migrating to Ubuntu server instead. This might give me pause

With a $85 price tag I think it's moving away from its original premise of bringing cheap computing to the masses and especially students and tinkerers.

Aside from that, I never liked the intimate relationship between Broadcomm and the RP Foundation.

Is migration from 32 bits possible?

In the comments on the announcement post, someone mentioned there would be a new post tomorrow covering more on the transition/upgrade, but it is supposedly possible using normal upgrade procedure (apt update then apt full-upgrade). At least that’s how I read it.

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