Raspberry Pi 4 goes 8GB, Pi OS goes 64 bit!

this morning the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a new 8 gigabyte version of the Raspberry Pi 4 they've been selling a 1 2 and 4 gigabyte version for the past year and I've been using all three models in my projects more RAM is always better because you can fit more applications on the same PI especially if you're using them in a kubernetes cluster like I am in my PI cluster series but one problem with more RAM on a Raspberry Pi is that the current version of raspbian which is a 32-bit operating system can only use a small amount of the memory for any given process so one application couldn't use all eight gigabytes of ram in the new PI model so the Raspberry Pi foundation also announced that raspbian OS is now going to be called Raspberry Pi OS and there's a new 64-bit beta version available today you can download it from the Raspberry Pi forums and as with everything else I've put a link to it in the description below what's so great about 64 bits well there are lots of reasons some which are more technical and I probably can't get to all them in this video but one very practical thing is there's more software especially for things like docker images that's built with arm 64 bit compatibility as an example many of the container images that I'm going to use in my next Raspberry Pi cluster video are available for x86 64 which is basically modern Intel or AMD processors or sometimes arm 64 but they won't run on any current Raspberry Pi running raspbian but more and more arm 64 images are becoming available and these work on all 64-bit ARM processors like the ones in a TOS arm instances or if you run a bunk to 64-bit on your Raspberry Pi this new 64-bit PI OS will allow me to use all those docker images and software and that's a really good thing in the comments on the blog post announcing these new products even Upton also dropped some new information he said that the Raspberry Pi computer 4 will be released this year this is really good news for the performance of Motoring pi cluster also Simon long a Raspberry Pi employee said there would be more details about the transition from raspbian to a Raspberry Pi OS in a new blog post that's going to come out tomorrow I've been testing the beta 64-bit OS today and here's what I learned some guides and software that have special PI configurations are currently a little bit broken on the 64-bit OS one interesting thing I noticed is with raspbian if you check the OS release file that's an etsy OS release the name is set to raspbian but with raspberry pi OS the name is debian so if software uses this name as a way to see whether it's running on a Raspberry Pi or not that can actually break things I also ran a bunch of short benchmarks on the 64-bit OS then ran the same benchmarks on the current raspbian 32-bit release and the results were kind of surprising a lot of CPU heavy operations are faster on the 64-bit OS I have a link to a blog post with more info about these benchmarks in the description in the real world outside of benchmarking you won't notice a huge difference but it is faster but the bottom line is this don't get too angry if you download it and you're using beta software and they run into some issues while I was doing my testing the PI locked up a couple times and I had to reboot it a forced reboot one time and I couldn't figure out exactly why it happened if you need something stable stick with the current Raspberry Pi OS and wait for the 64 bit version to get out of beta I don't yet have the eight gigabyte PI 4 but I've ordered one and hopefully I'll be able to share my thoughts on it soon I'm working hard on the next video for the PI cluster series and I know a lot of people are interested in and then so to make sure that you see them please click Subscribe below and support my work on patreon or github sponsors and there are links of course in the description below until next time I'm Jeff Garlin

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 79,338

Keywords: raspberry pi, raspbian, 64 bit, benchmark, performance, operating system, linux, arm, arm64

Id: aidkpsWlB40

Length: 4min 0sec (240 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020