Thursday, December 12, 2019

ARM64 on Raspberry Pi 4

It doesn't work. Well bits of it do. If you have got an up to date kernel, I am on 4.19.75, you can simply put it into 64 bit mode by adding "arm_64bit=1" (without the quotes) to the end of /boot/config.txt and reboot it. The kernel will now be an aarch64 kernel.

The Raspberry Pi foundation doesn’t currently have an arm64 repository so all of the programs are 32 bit (armhf) apart from the kernel. I had BOINC installed from the foundation repo (ie armhf version) and then switched the kernel to 64 bit mode and it continued to work. Not everything will. I wanted to get the arm64 version of BOINC. It kept choosing the foundation repo. I tried specifying I wanted the 64 bit version and it complained about dependencies. I commented out the foundation repos so it only knew about Debian and then I removed the armhf version of BOINC and tried installing the 64 bit version - it still complained. In the end I gave up.

My next step will be to try a 64 bit Ubuntu on it. Until then I have put it back to 32 bit mode and reinstalled the armhf apps.

1 comment:

Mark G James said...

After running more Einstein BRP4 work through the average run time is approx. 7 hours 40 minutes.