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64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

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Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#31

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?

[deleted]

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#32

Add a heatsink and fan. You'll get better performance.

Just run current firmware from last september or later and keep the pi4 standing up on its side naked, it will never throttle no matter what you throw at it. (unless maybe your room is 80F or more)

I've had my pi4 compile stuff for days on end and it does not throttle if the above setup is followed.

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#33
post #12

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

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

Uh, no. It's there because of the design goals and priorities of the Foundation. They want to be able to distribute a distribution that runs on any raspberry pi generation. Performance is of secondary concern to them. So Raspbian remains at 32-bit.

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#34

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?

I recently installed Arch Linux on my Pi Zero, it also uses FAT32 for the boot partition. I did the initial setup the way you described. Check out https://archlinuxarm.org/ , it's pretty great.

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#35
post #26

One downside: you will probably need a bit more memory to do the same work. An unmentioned benefit: better ASLR, for what that's worth. > A 64 bit system means that RAM can be accessed in 8 byte read/writes per instruction. I mean...kind of but that's probably not really what's happening in this benchmark. Firstly, in that test `memset()` is surely using NEON instructions internally on both ARMv7 and AArch64, which c…

I wonder if using zram or zswap can help "eat" those overly long pointers in RAM via compression ?

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#36
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raspbian did originally come with SSH enabled by default but the default credentials pi/raspberry made it trivial for misuse: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-malware-enslaves-raspber...

Probably the right decision then. As I don't put them on public networks and delete the pi user this is of little concern to me, but given the target group, it is a simple safety measure.

I think there is a better solution: On a new install on first login, over ssh or on the gui, a user/password must be created.

This way the initial login only works once. Both gui user/pass and ssh user/pass are tied by default.

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#37
One of the main benefits you get to running a proper aarch64 userspace is ability to run a modern functional firefox install. The 32-bit builds usually don't support anything newer than a very old LTS release. It's been hell trying to build and/or run that target (see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1452128 )

This is especially important if considering use as a low-end desktop as Chromium will eat through 4GB of ram like it's nobody's business.

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#38
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.

I have not used or had a need for hardware GL. Don't even know what MIPI is.

I use it as very cheap bare metal. Still plan to use 3 of them as Ceph monitors.

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#39

One of the main benefits you get to running a proper aarch64 userspace is ability to run a modern functional firefox install. The 32-bit builds usually don't support anything newer than a very old LTS release. It's been hell trying to build and/or run that target (see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1452128 ) This is especially important if considering use as a low-end desktop as Chromium will eat throu…

I'm running Firefox 73 on my BeagleBoard-X15 (Cortex-A15). Ubuntu 18.04.

$ dpkg -l | grep firefox

ii firefox

73.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.18.04.1 armhf

Safe and easy web browser from Mozilla

Re: 64 bit OS Raspberry Pi4 Benchmarks

#40
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have not used or had a need for hardware GL. Don't even know what MIPI is. I use it as very cheap bare metal. Still plan to use 3 of them as Ceph monitors.

Sounds like you're using them as servers. Doesn't the lack of ECC worry you?
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