Raspberry Pi OS 12 released

Marks Rpi Cluster is running mostly overnight now due to hot weather. I don't use air conditioning for the farm so if it gets too hot any in-flight tasks get suspended until the temperature drops.

Raspberry Pi OS 12 released
The Raspberry Pi foundation released Raspberry Pi OS 12, based upon Debian 12 (aka Bookworm). There was only 1 surprise as I already run Debian Bookworm on my x64 based machines. The surprise was the latest version of raspi-config has removed the setting of GPU memory which was in earlier releases.

As I run my Pis headless (no screen or keyboard) I run the "lite" version which doesn't include a desktop environment and therefore I don't need to allocate much memory for the GPU. The Pi has to share its system memory with the GPU but if you don't use the GPU then you can reduce it to the minimum allowed which is 16MB, at least it was for the Pi3 and Pi4, I can't comment on the Pi5 as I haven't got any.

You can manually set the GPU memory by editing /boot/config.txt and at the end adding:
[all]
gpu_mem=16

Other changes are Debian now default to using the timesyncd service and ntp is no longer offered. You can use ntpsec or chrony as a replacement for ntp. In fact if you ask apt to install ntp it will install ntpsec instead. This is because Debian and other Linux distributions are moving to more recent implementations of the network time protocol.

I have updated one of my Edge Cluster 12's to the Bookworm release and they are working fine so far, That is 12 out of 24 compute nodes. I get a more up to date boinc client (7.20.5) as a result of switching to Bookworm. Rather than using my new micro SD cards I just re-imaged the existing cards. I figured I would keep the new micro SD cards for the Pi5's whenever I can get them. I am waiting on BitScope to offer a version of the Edge Cluster that works with the Pi5. BitScope indicated they were testing Pi5's but didn't say when a compatible version of the Edge Cluster would be available.