
First fully functional 64-bit OS for the Raspberry Pi 4 - chrisys
https://www.balena.io/blog/balena-releases-first-fully-functional-64-bit-os-for-the-raspberry-pi-4/
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correct_horse
This is good news. I had assumed that raspbian was 64 bit by now. It seems
weird, since the Raspberry Pi v2.1 (second revision of Raspberry pi 2)
launched with a 64-bit processor. I can't find a date for that launch, but the
pi 3 launched in February 2016. The Pi foundation was forthcoming about
Raspbian being 32 bit in the pi3 announcement article, but the timescale they
laid out for making it 64 bit was "the next few months". I guess the reason
anyone bothered porting to 64 bit is the fact that the pi4 has a 4GB of RAM
option (you can't address the full 4GB with 32 bits).

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praseodym
Debian arm64 works fine on the Raspberry Pi 3
([https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi](https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi)).
The Pi 4 changed the boot sequence so that Debian doesn’t work any more,
making this the first 64-bit OS for the Pi 4.

~~~
weare138
They didn't say it is the first 64bit OS that runs on the Pi 4. The key phrase
is "fully functional" which has no definitive definition. It's just some
clickbait, marketing jargon.

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aap_
The first? Plan 9 (9front to be specific) had support for it for a few weeks
now.

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Vogtinator
> All these fixes were pushed upstream and are available in the main Raspberry
> Pi Linux repository.

Well that's just highly misleading. "upstream" in this case refers to the
outdated downstream kernel provided by the RPi foundation. Mainline does not
have support for brcmstb at all current.y

~~~
Fnoord
That's _an_ upstream, and it is defined right afterwards:

> and are available in the _main Raspberry Pi Linux repository_

Hardly misleading. It clearly says "Raspberry Pi" and it doesn't say "main
Linux repository". They could've added the word 'kernel' but then again I
suppose it is a general Raspberry Pi git repo. Merging the Raspberry Pi Linux
kernel repo with Torvalds' mainline isn't their responsibility.

That's not to say this whole thing isn't an advertisement though. This whole
balenaOS and balenaCloud thing is some kind of frontend for Docker and the
like, but have you seen the Pricing?

I'll just patiently wait for Raspbian Aarch64/ARM64 version instead :)

~~~
ksaj
It already is a huge improvement. So when it goes full 64 bit and all the
memory is accessible, it'll give a second bump to that experience of
improvement.

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jtenniswood
There are already builds of Ubuntu 64bit that are very solid...
[https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-ubuntu-server-
desk...](https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-ubuntu-server-
desktop-18-04-3-image-unofficial/)

