After staying in beta for a very long time (From May 2020), the RPI Foundation announcedRaspberry Pi OS64-bit for all the Raspberry Pi models based on arm64.
You can try out the new releases starting with Raspberry Pi 3 toRaspberry Pi 4and400,all based on 64-bit Broadcom SoCs.
In therelease post, Raspberry Pi’s Director of Software Engineering, Gordon Hollingworth, said, “We’ve come to realize 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 optimized for the armhf port.”
Adding to that, he said, “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.”
Gordon also said that while 32-bit pointers allowed addressing only 4GB of memory, this won’t be an issue in the 64-bit version as it can allocate the entire 8GB of memory. To previously allocate 8 gigs using the 32-bit RPI OS, the developers used the ARM Large Physical Address Extension (LPAE). Hence, as there are no longer any overheads needed in the 64-bit version, we may see a little improvement in the performance.
What are your thoughts about the Raspberry Pi OS? Have you driven it on your Raspberry Pi, or do you use otherRaspberry Pi distroslikePop!_OSor Manjaro? Let us know your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below.
We have a whole section full of articles dedicated to Raspberry Pi and its hacks; hence if you’re new to the platform, you might want tocheck it out.
