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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Are you running a 64 bit kernel actually? Which distribution?

I found I could either get a 64 bit kernel (lots of things) Or decent hardware support (raspbian) but not both.

There is now beta (?) builds of a 64bit raspberry pi os (formerly known as raspbian) available: https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/

Not sure how well it works, but it is a thing now

I'm not sure I understand what the purpose of the raspberry pi OS is anymore. In the past it was a pretty custom kernel, with a user environment stripped down to work with a minimal RAM configuration. Everyone put up with nonstandard SSH daemons/window managers/missing packages/etc because due to the constrained environment and the fact that arm wasn't a first class citizen with the likes of ubuntu/redhat/etc.

These days, every single major distro has rpi instructions, and 8G of ram is more than some laptops come with. So, its a disservice that they don't just tell people, here are a list of disto's which have been qualified to run on the hardware, pick one, and oh BTW, you can run those OS's on your laptop too.

I run Arch Linux ARM with the 64 bit kernel and userspace on my Raspberry Pi 3 for tinkering.

GPIO, Wifi, Ethernet, framebuffer HDMI, USB all work fine.

Video acceleration was the last hardware not supported in 64 bit land, and recent kernels finally have some experimental support. I haven't tried it myself though.

Raspbian itself has a beta 64 bit for kernel for a few months now.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/latest-raspberry-pi-os-upda...

With the latest Raspbian, you can always turn on the 64 bit kernel by modifying config.txt inside boot image and add: arm_64bit=1

My homelab is Kubernetes running on Raspberry Pi 4 with aarm64 architecture. So far, it works great.

> My homelab is Kubernetes running on Raspberry Pi 4

Honest question- do you just run one RPi4 or do you have multiple? Either way- how much ram do you have and do you find you use it all/wish you had more?

I have a cluster of 3 RPi4 each with 4GB RAM because it is super difficult to get the 8GB spec.

The more the better because it is difficult to run multiple dbs or queue systems right now.

Of course. The real problem is not the 64 bit kernel which you can easily get with Raspbian, but the 64 bit userspace for which you currently need a different distribution (but see sister comment). I'm using Fedora 33 Server.

  $ uname -a
  Linux rpi4.home.annexia.org 5.8.11-300.fc33.aarch64 #1 SMP Wed Sep 23 13:51:39 UTC 2020 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

Everything I care about except Wifi is currently supported.

I recently saw an article on setting up jitsi on a pi, and I thought it required 64-bit.

https://gist.github.com/krithin/e50a6001c8435e46cb85f5c6c78e...

I guess there's a 64-bit ubuntu 20.04 server

I've found Ubuntu Mate even easier to use than raspbian, and now it finally supports the Pi4:

https://ubuntu-mate.org/download/arm64/

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