5 ms·

"Just over two years ago, we released Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. This was our first 64-bit product" Very unfortunate that their in-house developed and promoted OS

"Just over two years ago, we released Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. This was our first 64-bit product" Very unfortunate that their in-house developed and promoted OS ("Raspbian") only supports armv7, thus leaving the vast majority that doesn't know about the existence of (or how to use) archlinux ARM an the likes with a 32 bit os. Am I the only one that doesn't get the sense out of this here? Debian supports Aarch64 out of the box I think.

jimmies 9y ago
To me, that makes a lot of sense. Having only one architecture to support and one image to rule them all across the product line is quite a great thing to have. The other day, there was a person who had a "reddit gold" bounty for the first person who can help them get the Pi 0 online. The person basically couldn't get the Pi Zero on the wireless network. They had no USB-OTG adapter or mini HDMI adapter they could use to debug the Pi Zero. I was thinking something along the line of making the Pi USB port a USB-serial gadget, but it was still cumbersome. The "accepted solution" was to pull out the SD card for the Zero, put it into a Pi3B they had, get the 3B online, and put it back to the Zero. I think that was such a brilliant idea. Making it easy for users to achieve such tasks is often overlooked by us who "know too much" to not care about the efficiency of the new hardware. I don't think it was an accident that the Pi is so ubiquitous in education: They made a lot of right decisions to make their product easy to use.
- qalmakka 9y ago
  Yes, but then promoting the Raspberry Pi as "64 bit product" seems almost gimmicky to me. Ok, you switched to an AArch64 chip, but that was simply because it's what your supplier was producing at that time. It makes no sense to me to promote a feature you don't support or make use of, if not for simple and pure marketing reasons.
  - yipbub 9y ago
    That there are other OSes that do support it mean that it is a feature.
    - izacus 9y ago
      Which OSes are that? I couldn't find a single one.
      - blacksmith_tb 9y ago
        There's also Pi64[1] which I have used and liked. 1: https://github.com/bamarni/pi64 https://github.com/bamarni/pi64
      - ac29 9y ago
        Arch Linux ARM will do AArch64: https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-pi-3 https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-...
      - floatboth 9y ago
        FreeBSD/arm64 works great on RPi3
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - candiodari 9y ago
    Reminds me of the 386 when 8M ram was quite a lot. 4 Gigs address space ! Few people even had hard drives that held 4 gigs.
- moftz 9y ago
  It would be even easier and less vague to just pop out the SD card, open up /etc/network/interfaces, and edit that to add your network. Pop it back in and go. This is what I've done when setting up a new raspberry pi image without having any peripherals attached to it. I ssh in, configure the system to my liking, then make an image of the SD card for future use. I could even turn this work into a script that downloads new raspbian images, edits them for my purposes, then packs them up to be used later.
  - jimmies 9y ago
    That's what the person did -- they put wpa_supplicant.conf to the boot partition -- but somehow the Pi wouldn't connect, and they had no way to debug it to figure out what went wrong.
    - safepants 9y ago
      i had this situation before but i realized i missed a critical step: adding wpa_supplicant.conf BEFORE first boot of the pi0w. Not saying it's the same issue, but i was scratching my head for a while there.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  I'd love to give reddit gold (if I had any) to anyone who could point me to a source for the Pi Zero at the price point it was originally supposed to be selling at: $5.00 I have yet to find it - you can get them cheap, but no where near what the RPi Foundation advertised them at when they first were announced/launched.
  - dtparr 9y ago
    It depends where you are. Microcenters generally have them for $5 ($10 for the 'W'), although for Pi Day they're both on sale for $3.14. Sadly, there aren't any near me, but I had a relative who is near them pick up a literal handful last time they came down. Several online places have them for $5, but shipping 'kills the deal' as they say.
    - antongribok 9y ago
      MicroCenter is where I buy them. I happen to have one close by. They also sell the normal RPi3 for $29.99 instead of $35.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - morganvachon 9y ago
    I got my last two Pi Zero units from Vilros[1], they have the Zero W for $10 which is the intended price from the RPi Foundation. To me, it's worth the extra $5 for WiFi/BT with no dongles. [1] https://www.vilros.com/shop/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-zero-w/ https://www.vilros.com/shop/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-zero-w...
lloeki 9y ago
The problem is VideoCore, as the Broadcom firmware and closed libraries are 32bit only. You can very easily† pop in an ArchLinux ARM AArch64[0] in there and notice that you only get a very basic framebuffer, sound is just not working at all, and the bootloader is quite incomplete. So ARMv7 it is for me, even with ArchLinux ARM and in spite of my wish for better FOSS support from Broadcom or in Linux mainline. † I find alarm much much better as a distro than raspbian as it's incredibly straightforward to install, maintain, and use, while vanilla debian is downright painful. [0]: https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-pi-3 https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-...
- qalmakka 9y ago
  Man, I hate how ARM OEMs are screwing up the whole platform as a viable PC-replacement platform, and I really wish they would reconsider some of the money-grubbing choices they made. Having a standardised platform such as the x86(-64) PC platform is fantastic for tinkering and long term support and reusability of your machines; things such as binary only drivers with just 2 year support (coff coff Qualcomm) are an absolute shame.
  - imtringued 9y ago
    There is also the fact that UEFI is rather suboptimal. They are adopting UEFI on the server chips because they've failed to develop a new standard. They've missed a chance to improve upon UEFI. Now they are stuck inheriting UEFI's problems because otherwise there would be no standard at all.
    - bnolsen 9y ago
      ugh thats bad news. i can't stand uefi its more a hindrance than help.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
    To be fair, drivers for most x86-compatible hardware are binary-only. Not that I agree with the practice, but there is precedent.
bunderbunder 9y ago
I'm really pretty OK with it. The thing only has 1GB of RAM, so there's not a whole lot of value in having a >4GB address space. Might as well default to having the perf boost and reduction in memory consumption that comes with pointers that are half as big. People who actually have a use for 64bit on their pis will generally know what to do, and I'm guessing most of of them won't have a whole lot of use for the streamlined UX that is Raspbian's raison d'etre, anyway.
- vardump 9y ago
  > so there's not a whole lot of value in having a >4GB address space. Don't most ARMv7 CPUs (like A7, A15, etc.) have 1 TB address space? On LPAE ARM, 64-bit arch will only get you larger virtual address space, but you get same 40-bit address space in both cases. > reduction in memory consumption that comes with pointers that are half as big Nothing prevents you from running 32-bit binaries on 64-bit OS, as long as you have 4kB page size.
  - bunderbunder 9y ago
    What use to I have for being able to address a hypothetical 1TB of memory on a computer that's got a fixed 1GB of memory soldered to the board? I can see having a bit of headroom for virtual memory, but I wouldn't want to actually use it. The non-volatile storage on this computer is an SD card, so paging will be particularly expensive. Are you really going to have more than 3GB of swap? That's a pretty big appetite for thrashing. Regarding running 32-bit binaries on 64-bit OS, sure, and the code that lives in those binaries will run faster. But you'll still be needlessly taking a hit on the 64-bit kernel and userland.
    - vardump 9y ago
      My implicit point was that addressable memory size is not a factor when choosing between 32 and 64-bit ARM. Looks like I should have communicated it more clearly. AArch64 does have some perks, but mostly for out-of-order cores, which RPI3's Cortex A53 is not. That said, even A53 can benefit from 31 registers in 64-bit mode. Large virtual address space is nice not only for memory mapping files, but to do lazy initialization while keeping high performance direct pointer access characteristics. That way you can have the MMU doing the check and indirection for you instead of slow explicit conditional check in code. You can mitigate pointer size by ensuring memory accesses are PC-relative. Perhaps there could be support for something similar to x32 ABI [0] as well. AArch64 codegen does need to generate more conditional jumps or CSELs (like cmove) though. Also function entry & exit code is larger due to lack of LDM & STM (load/store multiple). But on the other hand, stack spills are rarer, thanks to 31 general purpose registers instead of 14 on 32-bit ARM. Where AArch64 truly shines is when you have a real out-of-order CPU core, for example Cortex A72. There are significantly more opportunities for instruction level parallelism due to dropping instruction predicates and other changes. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI
l1k 9y ago
It's worse, Raspbian is compiled for armv6 to also support the BCM2835 (Raspberry Pi 1). Here's a performance comparison between a modern 64-bit armv8 Linux on a Le Potato SBC versus armv6 Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi 3: https://libre.computer/2017/12/03/performance-and-power-consumption-comparison-for-aml-s905x-cc-le-potato-and-raspberry-pi-3-model-b/ https://libre.computer/2017/12/03/performance-and-power-cons...

jimmies 9y ago

To me, that makes a lot of sense. Having only one architecture to support and one image to rule them all across the product line is quite a great thing to have. The other day, there was a person who had a "reddit gold" bounty for the first person who can help them get the Pi 0 online. The person basically couldn't get the Pi Zero on the wireless network. They had no USB-OTG adapter or mini HDMI adapter they could use to debug the Pi Zero. I was thinking something along the line of making the Pi USB port a USB-serial gadget, but it was still cumbersome. The "accepted solution" was to pull out the SD card for the Zero, put it into a Pi3B they had, get the 3B online, and put it back to the Zero. I think that was such a brilliant idea. Making it easy for users to achieve such tasks is often overlooked by us who "know too much" to not care about the efficiency of the new hardware. I don't think it was an accident that the Pi is so ubiquitous in education: They made a lot of right decisions to make their product easy to use.

qalmakka 9y ago
Yes, but then promoting the Raspberry Pi as "64 bit product" seems almost gimmicky to me. Ok, you switched to an AArch64 chip, but that was simply because it's what your supplier was producing at that time. It makes no sense to me to promote a feature you don't support or make use of, if not for simple and pure marketing reasons.
- yipbub 9y ago
  That there are other OSes that do support it mean that it is a feature.
  - izacus 9y ago
    Which OSes are that? I couldn't find a single one.
    - blacksmith_tb 9y ago
      There's also Pi64[1] which I have used and liked. 1: https://github.com/bamarni/pi64 https://github.com/bamarni/pi64
    - ac29 9y ago
      Arch Linux ARM will do AArch64: https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-pi-3 https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-...
    - floatboth 9y ago
      FreeBSD/arm64 works great on RPi3
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- candiodari 9y ago
  Reminds me of the 386 when 8M ram was quite a lot. 4 Gigs address space ! Few people even had hard drives that held 4 gigs.
moftz 9y ago
It would be even easier and less vague to just pop out the SD card, open up /etc/network/interfaces, and edit that to add your network. Pop it back in and go. This is what I've done when setting up a new raspberry pi image without having any peripherals attached to it. I ssh in, configure the system to my liking, then make an image of the SD card for future use. I could even turn this work into a script that downloads new raspbian images, edits them for my purposes, then packs them up to be used later.
- jimmies 9y ago
  That's what the person did -- they put wpa_supplicant.conf to the boot partition -- but somehow the Pi wouldn't connect, and they had no way to debug it to figure out what went wrong.
  - safepants 9y ago
    i had this situation before but i realized i missed a critical step: adding wpa_supplicant.conf BEFORE first boot of the pi0w. Not saying it's the same issue, but i was scratching my head for a while there.
cr0sh 9y ago
I'd love to give reddit gold (if I had any) to anyone who could point me to a source for the Pi Zero at the price point it was originally supposed to be selling at: $5.00 I have yet to find it - you can get them cheap, but no where near what the RPi Foundation advertised them at when they first were announced/launched.
- dtparr 9y ago
  It depends where you are. Microcenters generally have them for $5 ($10 for the 'W'), although for Pi Day they're both on sale for $3.14. Sadly, there aren't any near me, but I had a relative who is near them pick up a literal handful last time they came down. Several online places have them for $5, but shipping 'kills the deal' as they say.
  - antongribok 9y ago
    MicroCenter is where I buy them. I happen to have one close by. They also sell the normal RPi3 for $29.99 instead of $35.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- morganvachon 9y ago
  I got my last two Pi Zero units from Vilros[1], they have the Zero W for $10 which is the intended price from the RPi Foundation. To me, it's worth the extra $5 for WiFi/BT with no dongles. [1] https://www.vilros.com/shop/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-zero-w/ https://www.vilros.com/shop/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-zero-w...

lloeki 9y ago

The problem is VideoCore, as the Broadcom firmware and closed libraries are 32bit only. You can very easily† pop in an ArchLinux ARM AArch64[0] in there and notice that you only get a very basic framebuffer, sound is just not working at all, and the bootloader is quite incomplete. So ARMv7 it is for me, even with ArchLinux ARM and in spite of my wish for better FOSS support from Broadcom or in Linux mainline. † I find alarm much much better as a distro than raspbian as it's incredibly straightforward to install, maintain, and use, while vanilla debian is downright painful. [0]: https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-pi-3 https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-...

qalmakka 9y ago
Man, I hate how ARM OEMs are screwing up the whole platform as a viable PC-replacement platform, and I really wish they would reconsider some of the money-grubbing choices they made. Having a standardised platform such as the x86(-64) PC platform is fantastic for tinkering and long term support and reusability of your machines; things such as binary only drivers with just 2 year support (coff coff Qualcomm) are an absolute shame.
- imtringued 9y ago
  There is also the fact that UEFI is rather suboptimal. They are adopting UEFI on the server chips because they've failed to develop a new standard. They've missed a chance to improve upon UEFI. Now they are stuck inheriting UEFI's problems because otherwise there would be no standard at all.
  - bnolsen 9y ago
    ugh thats bad news. i can't stand uefi its more a hindrance than help.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
  To be fair, drivers for most x86-compatible hardware are binary-only. Not that I agree with the practice, but there is precedent.

bunderbunder 9y ago

I'm really pretty OK with it. The thing only has 1GB of RAM, so there's not a whole lot of value in having a >4GB address space. Might as well default to having the perf boost and reduction in memory consumption that comes with pointers that are half as big. People who actually have a use for 64bit on their pis will generally know what to do, and I'm guessing most of of them won't have a whole lot of use for the streamlined UX that is Raspbian's raison d'etre, anyway.

vardump 9y ago
> so there's not a whole lot of value in having a >4GB address space. Don't most ARMv7 CPUs (like A7, A15, etc.) have 1 TB address space? On LPAE ARM, 64-bit arch will only get you larger virtual address space, but you get same 40-bit address space in both cases. > reduction in memory consumption that comes with pointers that are half as big Nothing prevents you from running 32-bit binaries on 64-bit OS, as long as you have 4kB page size.
- bunderbunder 9y ago
  What use to I have for being able to address a hypothetical 1TB of memory on a computer that's got a fixed 1GB of memory soldered to the board? I can see having a bit of headroom for virtual memory, but I wouldn't want to actually use it. The non-volatile storage on this computer is an SD card, so paging will be particularly expensive. Are you really going to have more than 3GB of swap? That's a pretty big appetite for thrashing. Regarding running 32-bit binaries on 64-bit OS, sure, and the code that lives in those binaries will run faster. But you'll still be needlessly taking a hit on the 64-bit kernel and userland.
  - vardump 9y ago
    My implicit point was that addressable memory size is not a factor when choosing between 32 and 64-bit ARM. Looks like I should have communicated it more clearly. AArch64 does have some perks, but mostly for out-of-order cores, which RPI3's Cortex A53 is not. That said, even A53 can benefit from 31 registers in 64-bit mode. Large virtual address space is nice not only for memory mapping files, but to do lazy initialization while keeping high performance direct pointer access characteristics. That way you can have the MMU doing the check and indirection for you instead of slow explicit conditional check in code. You can mitigate pointer size by ensuring memory accesses are PC-relative. Perhaps there could be support for something similar to x32 ABI [0] as well. AArch64 codegen does need to generate more conditional jumps or CSELs (like cmove) though. Also function entry & exit code is larger due to lack of LDM & STM (load/store multiple). But on the other hand, stack spills are rarer, thanks to 31 general purpose registers instead of 14 on 32-bit ARM. Where AArch64 truly shines is when you have a real out-of-order CPU core, for example Cortex A72. There are significantly more opportunities for instruction level parallelism due to dropping instruction predicates and other changes. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI

l1k 9y ago

It's worse, Raspbian is compiled for armv6 to also support the BCM2835 (Raspberry Pi 1). Here's a performance comparison between a modern 64-bit armv8 Linux on a Le Potato SBC versus armv6 Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi 3: https://libre.computer/2017/12/03/performance-and-power-consumption-comparison-for-aml-s905x-cc-le-potato-and-raspberry-pi-3-model-b/ https://libre.computer/2017/12/03/performance-and-power-cons...