Popular Post bluesman Posted June 3, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted June 3, 2020 Good afternoon, all! I just put the new 64 bit OS from the Raspberry Pi Foundation through some benchmark testing and thought you'd like to know what it will do. I posted this on the General Forum because you can use an SBC for so many things that no other hardware or software category encompassed it as well. Also, I see little discussion of operating systems on the Software Forum. The executive summary is as easy as Pi: the Raspberry Pi Foundation has just issued their first 64 bit operating system for the Pi, and used this as an opportunity to rename it from Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS. This version is in beta (details HERE - download HERE) and is not yet fully functional. Hardware acceleration is not yet coded in for Chromium or VNC, and VLC is also AWOL for now. It runs on both 3B+s and 4Bs, and it (finally!) allows full access of the RAM on Pi 4s (including the new 8 gig version). It installed without a hitch on a stock 3B+ and it's faster in general use than any Raspbian. Downloading and installing proceed much faster than on a 32 bit 3B+, and desktop GUI performance is now fast enough to be truly pleasant even on a 3B+. I haven't put it on a 4 yet because my 4s are in the middle of other projects - but I'll get to that as soon as I'm done with one. It's clearly a step forward, but that big fat BETA looms large for now. I ran initial benchmarks on Hardinfo, and here's the result. A stock Pi 3B+ running the 64 bit OS performs between a stock Pi 3B+ and a stock Pi 4B (4 gig) running the latest 32 bit Raspbian: TEST (lower is better except as noted) 32 bit Pi 4 32 bit Pi 3 64 bit Pi 3 BLOWFISH 6.86 10.64 9.2 CRYPTOHASH (higher is better) 354.6 128.76 147.59 FIBONACCI 2.31 4 3.62 N-QUEENS 11.62 9.41 5.76 Zlib (higher is better) 0.26 0.13 0.13 FFT 5.43 11.98 11.39 Raytracing 2.89 7 5.22 The sysbench performance was similarly stratified. The total time for a 10,000 event CPU benchmark run was 10 seconds for the 64 bit 3B+ and 30 seconds for the same 3B+ running 32 bit Raspbian Buster. The zlib performance is the same for both 32 bit and 64 bit systems, but that test only measures combined CPU and memory subsystem performance on compression tasks - so I didn't expect the new OS to improve this on the same quad core Pi 3B+. Most importantly for audiophiles, even simple installations of audio software (VLC, JRiver Media Center) will not succeed without rolling your own code. This is apparently because several files have been moved from their previous locations in the opt directory to the lib directory in the 64 bit OS. While this is a more standard location for files like libraspberrypi0, libraspberrypi-dev and libraspberrypi-doc, code written for prior Raspbian installations needs to be rewritten (e.g. by changing /opt/vc/lib to /usr/lib) and packages that expect libGLESv2.so and libEGL will have to be rebuilt. There's a pretty good list of bugs and issues HERE. I have little doubt and a lot of confidence that these will be addressed. However, I have a bit less confidence that it will happen in the immediate future - it will also require a lot of patience before we can use it as fully, successfully, and easily as we do the current 32 bit Raspbian Buster. Roon Bridge would not install, throwing a "failed" on "checking for ALSA libraries" even though I'm pretty sure I loaded and confirmed those dependencies correctly. My suspicion is that they're in the wrong folder now, as above. I was able to get sound from the analog jack by entering aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav and speaker-test -t sine -f 440 -c 2 -s 1 into a command line, and I was able to install QMMP. But the new 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS is still very much a work in progress - it's simply not ready for prime time play, and will probably remain too much trouble to adopt for most of us for a bit longer. So here's the bottom line: the new 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS promises to be faster and more versatile than good old Raspbian. My initial benchmark tests show it to push a stock 3b+ halfway across the performance gap to a stock 4B. I'll run a full battery on a 4 gig Pi 4 and compare it to a stock 4 to be sure we'll see the same kind of improvement. I'm pretty sure we will....in some areas, but probably not all. Unlike the 32 bit system, it will enable full use of RAM beyond 3 gigs - and I assume and hope (but don't yet know for sure) that the USB issues are gone with the 64 bit system. Even with "only" 8 gigs, it should make anything from a simple player to a full JRiver Media Center 26 instance at least as usable and enjoyable for audiophiles as it would be on a good, basic x86 box. BTW, the main reason for having to wait so long for even a 4 gig Pi was that no one made a compatible RAM chip until Micron came to the rescue. The 64 bit OS will enable full use of up to 16 gigs. So if Micron is similarly disposed toward the fringe, maybe we'll see a 16 gig Pi in the future, so those who find enhanced SQ playing files from RAM will finally be able to do it on a Pi with files of any currently available format and resolution. Throwing in serious DSP would probably still be beyond the limits for the CPU, but we make haste slowly. Every day's a new one for the audiophile! mitchco and Cebolla 2 Link to comment
jriver Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 Bluesman, Thanks for all the details. We're in a wait and see mode for the time being as they finish the work. Bob has done a 64 bit build of MC on ARM for a different OS, so it shouldn't take long. JimH bluesman 1 Jim Hillegass / JRiver Media Center / jriver.com Link to comment
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