The first official 64-bit OS for Raspberry Pi arrives -- but there's a catch

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is the first 64-bit version of the popular barebones computer, yet despite its processor upgrade, there isn't an official 64-bit OS available for it. That's because the Raspberry Pi Foundation has focused instead on making its Raspbian OS run on all generations of Pi. However, the good news is Pi 3 owners can now take advantage of the full capabilities of their device, thanks to SUSE which has released a version of its 64-bit Linux Enterprise Server product that supports Raspberry Pi 3. This is something to get excited about because, as Raspberry Pi Founder... [Continue Reading]

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Eduardo 
www.alt119.net
Reply to
JEMM
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So it's an (evaluation license for an) enterprise server - I'd be interested to hear of an appropriate application for this particular combination of hardware and software.

Reply to
Rob Morley

Should you do datetime calculation on a Pi? Is the Pi meant for simple sometimes naive purposes?

Reply to
Mr. Man-wai Chang

Until the Pi has > 4Gbytes memory, I think there's very little point in having a 64 bit OS for it. Indeed, the increased pointer sizes, leading to increased working set size, could be a significant performance cost on 1GByte memory systems. One area where it might help particularly for Linux systems are kernel based applications which suffer from the very small amount of kernel memory available in 32 bit Linux, such as using the system as an NFS server and/or ZFS server, but no large user-space processes.

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Andrew Gabriel 
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Yes but the main reason is to be able to play with the new 64 bit instruction set.

---druck

Reply to
druck

Why would you post a clickbait summary here?? And with a dubious url. Here's the full story:

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which reads:

--------------------------------- SUSE LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER FOR RASPBERRY PI

Raspberry Pi 3, with its quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor, is our first 64-bit product, supporting ARM?s A64 instruction set and the ARMv8-A architecture. However, we?ve not yet taken the opportunity to ship a 64-bit operating system: our Raspbian images are designed to run on every Raspberry Pi, including the 32-bit ARMv6 Raspberry Pi 1 and Raspberry Pi Zero, and the 32-bit ARMv7 Raspberry Pi 2. We use an ARMv6 userland with selected ARMv7 fast paths enabled at run time.

There?s been some great work done in the community. Thanks to some heroic work from forum user Electron752, we have a working 64-bit kernel, and both Ubuntu and Fedora userlands have been run successfully on top of this.

[ SUSE and ARM distributed these natty cased Raspberry Pi units at last week?s SUSEcon ]

Which brings us to last week?s announcement: that SUSE have released a version of their Linux Enterprise Server product that supports Raspberry Pi 3.

Why is this important? Because for the first time we have an official

64-bit operating system release from a major vendor, with support for our onboard wireless networking and Bluetooth. SUSE have kindly upstreamed the patches that they needed to make this work, so hopefully official support from other vendors won?t be far behind.

You can download an image here. Give it a spin and let us know what you think.

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The info from SuSE:

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Reply to
A. Dumas

Fair enough, and it would give a reason for the processor developers to consider how to build a > 4Gbyte Pi.

There may be some other advantages too. For example, when AMD designed the x64 instruction set, they doubled the number of program accessible registers, and this enabled much better optimisation by compiler writers, so 32bit x86 code generally runs faster with just a 64bit recompile, even without explicitly using any 64 bit features, providing the increased working set size doesn't push it past the available memory. On other architectures which support both 32 and 64bit execution, but without significantly extra registers in 64 bit mode, simply recompiling 32bit code as 64 bit generally runs slower.

It looks like ARM have done the same as AMD did, so 64bit may offer performance benefits even for programs which are simply recompiled, and don't explicitly make use of 64bits (such as being able to mmap more than 4Gbytes, run with lots more thread stacks, etc). However, on a 1Gbyte system, you will need to be very careful you don't fall off the performance cliff if your working set size grows to exceed the memory size, so I would see this mainly as a precursor to a larger memory Pi.

The other area where the Pi looks increasingly unbalanced as the memory has grown is the I/O bandwidth available over USB and ethernet, which without a boost could limit the usefulness of a larger memory

64 bit Pi.
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Andrew Gabriel 
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

The FreeBSD group is also working on a raspberry pi3 images:

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Reply to
sean

I gave it a spin at the weekend, I was impressed that a small CPU bound program ran 56% faster single threaded, and 75% faster multi-threaded in

64bit compared to 32bit mode. I wasn't so pleased when the python version of it ran at only half the speed, so perhaps they've still got a bit of optimising to do.

---druck

Reply to
druck

Compared with what? Your (C?) compiled version, or a python version? What was the process size of the python version? Was it struggling to fit in memory?

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Andrew Gabriel 
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

No, comparing the Python on 32 bit and 64 bit OS's (it's about 100x slower than C++). The Python code is small and doesn't use much memory.

---druck

Reply to
druck

How do the binary sizes compare ?

Sounds like the python compile is missing some optimisations.

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:>WIN                                      | A better way to focus the sun 
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Reply to
Ahem A Rivet's Shot

The size of Python code is deceiving: the bulk hides in the Python interpreter, which is not used at all in pure C code.

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-TV
Reply to
Tauno Voipio

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