I should warn everyone about 'upgrading' off buster though:

- If you use steamlink, this will be regressed
- No wicd, you'll be forced to use wpasupplicant which is very difficult to configure in some enviroments (per the usual debian downstream extinguishing way)
- xfce's new theme system regressions. This may matter if you're using certain old OS themes no one's ever updating.

Thanks a lot for the warning! 🙂

Yes, I also think upgrading from previous versions always had been risky in some way.

It's perhaps not exactly what you mean, but..
In the past, upgrading an existing installation, for example, broke certain things.
- At least on my Pi 4 which I do use as a temporary* substitute for a desktop PC.

I did read that Raspbian / Raspberry Pi OS wasn't really meant to be upgraded that way.

Instead, a clean install is recommended each time a new major release comes out.

(*For several years now)

But is it any faster?
If not then I don't see any other reason to switch to 64 bits, at least for now.

But we’ve come to realise that there are reasons to choose a 64-bit operating system over a 32-bit one. Compatibility is a key concern: many closed-source applications are only available for arm64, and open-source ones aren’t fully optimised for the armhf port. Beyond that there are some performance benefits intrinsic to the A64 instruction set: today, these are most visible in benchmarks, but the assumption is that these will feed through into real-world application performance in the future.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-os-64-bit/

Azarien wrote on 2022-02-03, 15:04:

But is it any faster?
If not then I don't see any other reason to switch to 64 bits, at least for now.

I read about 20% to 25% (roughly) increase in performance.

https://raspberrytips.com/raspberry-pi-os-64- … its-vs-32-bits/

https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/raspberry-pi- … -32-vs-64-bits/

https://matteocroce.medium.com/why-you-should … i4-bd5290d48947

Perhaps that's mainly interesting for networking, though.

But since *nix/Linux is somewhat obsessed with TCP/IP, for example,
for data exchange between programs, it might affect all sorts of use cases in practice.

Edit: Thanks for the link, Firtasik! 🙂

I did forget to mention..

Adding

arm_64bit=1

to config.txt (boot partition) will load a 64-Bit kernal on 32-Bit Raspbian.

But as I said, it's just for the kernal. The rest of the OS is still 32-Bit..

Quick update.

Hackaday.com reports about 64-Bit Raspberry Pi OS, too!

https://hackaday.com/2022/02/04/a-64-bit-rasp … -pi-os-at-last/

This makes me and my 4 Raspberry Pi 3Bs very happy.

Phoronix has posted benchmark results, comparing Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit with Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit on a a Raspberry Pi 400 with 4GB RAM.

Spoiler alert: the 64-bit OS outperforms the 32-bit OS in every benchmark, some slightly, others considerably.

It's definitely worth upgrading to the 64-bit OS if you're running a device in the Raspberry Pi 4 family.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=articl … bit-64bit&num=1

It will be nice to see the performance differences benchmarked on a Raspberry Pi 3 as well.

How is the RAM consumption though? Do you really wanna upgrade a low RAM model?

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-08, 14:54:

How is the RAM consumption though? Do you really wanna upgrade a low RAM model?

Jeff Geerling actually has some numbers on differences in RAM consumption, in the comparisons he did. This link fast-forwards to the relevant part: https://youtu.be/ET-DJLnNX-Q?t=143

On a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with 512MB RAM, he measured an increase in RAM usage of 32%, which admittedly, is not insignificant.

By the way, this entire YouTube video is worth watching. Jeff makes some good additional cases why it might be a good idea to upgrade to the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS anyway.

Thanks for the link! 😎👍

Yeah, I guess the Zero's are very underpowered, anyway.
- My original Pis are somewhat slow, too.
I really noticed that first time after using a Pi 3 for a while.

Kinda reminds me of running OS/2 on PCs with 4MB of RAM.

Maybe the Lite versions of Raspberry Pi OS are a better choice? 😀
Or just use a 64-Bit kernal and leave the rest in 32-Bit userland? 😉

Jo22 wrote on 2022-02-03, 14:47:

I did read that Raspbian / Raspberry Pi OS wasn't really meant to be upgraded that way.

Instead, a clean install is recommended each time a new major release comes out.

Successful upgrade or not (fresh), what i've mentioned still stands. Blowing away a working system's a habit for a Pi vet and there's some that aren't into that (especially with the market positioning for being a production desktop system platform since Pi 4 and Pi400)

My Raspberry does more I/O (via downloads, server things) than CPU stuff, so I wonder if there is much to be gained from switching to 64 bits. It seems that most tests on the web have been CPU oriented ones, I'd like to see anybody doing a database stress test.

(Waiting for a Raspberry with SATA connector)

Zup wrote on 2022-02-09, 06:31:

(Waiting for a Raspberry with SATA connector)

You might want to go for a Raspberry Compute Module 4 and stick it on a third-party board that has the interfaces you want.

Jeff Geerling has reviewed quite a few of those third-party boards on his YouTube channel.

Some of those boards even provide an NVMe slot, wired up to the Compute Module 4's PCI Express bus. That's the fastest I/O you can achieve on a Raspberry Pi. And newer firmware versions of the Compute Module 4 even support booting directly from NVMe now. (Unless the PCI Express bus is shared with other devices as well, through a multiplexer chip, which is needed to hook up the USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet controller along with an NVMe interface. But even then you can just put the boot partition on the onboard MMC drive or an SD card, and have the rest of your OS on the NVMe drive.)

If you can get your hands on the 8GB RAM version of the Compute Module 4 (which is admittedly hard to come by at the moment), and pair it with NVMe, you should have a pretty capable and relatively affordable ARM64-based desktop system. In the case of 8GB RAM, I would definitely go with the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (or another compatible 64-bit Linux distro), though.

By the way, I don't currently own a Compute Module 4 and so I haven't tried such a setup yet. But I would like to try something like that as a daily driver. I've gotten bored with x86, and Apple's ecosystem feels too constrained in terms of tinkering and is way more expensive, as tempting as their M1-based Macs and Macbooks are.

By the way, a Raspberry Pi 4 with a Thunderbolt port would be really sweet. Right now, with the exception of the CM4, the Raspberry Pi 4 family of devices has a PCI Express bus that you can't tap into without some very finicky and risky SMD soldering work. Such a shame!

By the way, my personal favorite CM4 project is the CM4_MATX, a micro-ATX motherboard that you plug a CM4 module into.

https://github.com/TheGuyDanish/CM4_MATX

The main developer has gotten pretty far with his design, but he needs help from knowledgeable hardware engineers to work on it further.

This is a really cool project for whoever wants to use a Raspberry Pi as a desktop computer.

Please spread the word about this project. Help is welcome!

only pi I have is a 1st gen with 512MB of RAM. Pretty slow with even the 32-bit raspbian. Still good news nonetheless.

Quick update. The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a new beta bootloader for the Pi 4 and the Pi 400.

The latter is a modified Pi 4 in a QWERTY keyboard case and misses the analogue outputs for audio/video.

The new bootloader will allow downloading an OS via network/the internet.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/09/raspbe … k_install_beta/

I've been using PINN for that instead.