A year and a half after the arrival of the beta version of the 64-bit Raspberry Pi operating system, it is now stable, according to Raspberry Pi. The manufacturer has unveiled the beta version of the 64-bit version of its operating system. Debian-based exploitation alongside its then-new 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 in mid-2020. The first Raspberry Pi with a 64-bit CPU was the Pi 3, so it’s been possible to run a 64-bit OS since it was released in 2016, but Raspberry Pi was sticking with a 32-bit OS (then called Raspbian) for reasons of compatibility between devices dating from 2011.
“Over the past year, we have been beta testing a 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS. Now is the time to open it up to a wider audience,” argues Gordon Hollingworth of Raspberry Pi. 64-bit operating system rather than a 32-bit system. “Many closed-code applications are only available for Arm64, and open-source applications are not fully optimized for the armhf port,” he explains, referring to Debian/Raspbian’s armfh ports.
And to add that there are “intrinsic” performance advantages to the A64 Armv8 instruction set. Today, these gains are mostly visible in benchmarks, but the leader believes they will become real-world application performance improvements in the future.
Optimize memory
Another Raspberry Pi “theoretical concern” was that 32-bit pointers only allowed users to address 4 GB of memory, which was not optimal given that developers could use up to 8 GB of RAM on the Pi 4. However, as the executive notes, few use cases today require the 8 GB of addressable memory of a single process.
In practice, the Pi 4 uses the Arm Large Physical Address Extension (LPAE) to access up to 8 GB of memory, but each process is limited to 3 GB, with the top 1 GB of virtual address space being reserved for the kernel.
The “full” 64-bit desktop OS, with recommended apps, and the “lite” version, without those apps, are now available on the Raspberry Pi Imager. While the 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS remains the system operating system “recommended”, 64-bit versions are available in the “others” section of the Raspberry Pi OS. The Raspberry Pi executive notes that the 64-bit version of Chromium does not have a version of the WidevineCDM library, which means it cannot play streaming media such as Netflix or Disney+.
Source: ZDNet.com