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64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

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Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#11
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you need the `arm_64bit=1` flag to get 64-bit kernel, 64-bit userland or no? I would have thought 64-bit everything would have been the default.

I just gave it a try and now apt is installing a bunch of new kernel .img files. So for me, yes, this seemed to be required before 64bit kernels were installed. I'm feeling surprised. I'm 40% of the way through the install and hoping it reboots okay in the end. Edit: to be more clear, I also run 'apt update' afterwards

Update: oh yeah, that broke a lot of stuff

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#16
post #12

I think the main issue keeping the pi with a 32b userspace is the lack of availability of 64bit GPU firmware

The fully open source driver stack can't some soon enough. (yes I know firmware files still exist, but they don't prevent you from running a 64 bit kernel and userspace)

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#17

So running the Pi in 64-bit is really overall beneficial. I'm running a customised version of Ubuntu for the Pi4. https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi I've also customised the image by adding users, public keys and such. Removing some of the cloud cruft. These instructions make it very, very easy and you can do this on an x86 machine. Just make sure to use /usr/bin/qemu-aarch64-static (64 bits) instead of qemu-ar…

The flipside is-- if you have a 1GB pi, you're going to be wasting a whole lot of RAM on wider pointers, and you may be more constrained by RAM than CPU throughput.

(Also, 64 bit Pi is not nearly as well supported as 32 bit currently. Does hardware GL work yet? What about if you're going to do MIPI, etc?) IMO it's worth waiting for a little more maturity.

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#18

Has anyone gotten the aarch64 Raspberry Pi image of Alpine to work on the Pi 4? It seems like a good fit for a RAM constrained system but I could never get it past the colorful boot screen.

It's fairly easy to trim down what runs on Raspbian. so if your only concern is background tasks eating RAM, you don't need something like Alpine to fix that issue. We use Pis at my work for running slideshows, and while performing their duty they use about 123MB of RAM for all running software (mostly our software + monitoring tools).

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#19
One of the things that I find great about Raspbian is that the boot files are stored on a FAT32 partition which is readable from any OS, and there are some nice considerations for headless setups: drop in a wpa_supplicant.conf to configure Wi-Fi, `touch ssh` to get OpenSSH enabled at next boot. Do any of the alternative OSes, like Ubuntu, offer this?

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#20
post #17

So running the Pi in 64-bit is really overall beneficial. I'm running a customised version of Ubuntu for the Pi4. https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi I've also customised the image by adding users, public keys and such. Removing some of the cloud cruft. These instructions make it very, very easy and you can do this on an x86 machine. Just make sure to use /usr/bin/qemu-aarch64-static (64 bits) instead of qemu-ar…

The flipside is-- if you have a 1GB pi, you're going to be wasting a whole lot of RAM on wider pointers, and you may be more constrained by RAM than CPU throughput. (Also, 64 bit Pi is not nearly as well supported as 32 bit currently. Does hardware GL work yet? What about if you're going to do MIPI, etc?) IMO it's worth waiting for a little more maturity.

Has nobody tried to implement an aarch64 equivalent of the "x32" ABI? That is, using the 64-bit instruction set but keeping pointers 32 bits long?
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