Thursday, November 11, 2021

Bullseye for the Pi


Yesterday the Raspberry Pi foundation released Raspberry Pi OS based upon Debian bullseye. Debian released bullseye on the 14th of August 2021 and its taken a while for the foundation to get their release ready. The official announcement is HERE if you want to get the details straight from the horses mouth.

I've been running bullseye on my x64 based machines since August so its pretty much the same. Behind the scenes the foundation have reworked the desktop and switched to using mutter so some apps may not work correctly.

There is a possible speed boost if you have a newish Pi4. For the SoC (System on a Chip) that have the last 3 characters C0T of the Broadcom part number it will now boost to 1.8GHz, but those of you with the B0T part will only boost to 1.5GHz as before, unless you've already over clocked the Pi. The Pi400 uses the C0T part and it was already boosting to 1.8GHz.

A couple of quirks I found:

1. iptables isn't in the arm64 "lite" image. I had to installed the iptables package.

2. The boinc-client service is disabled by default so you have to start it manually. If you want it to start automatically type in the command "sudo systemctl enable boinc-client".

3. Bullseye now uses systemd-timesyncd for time syncing. Its a simple SNTP service that doesn't have much one can configure. Fortunately if you install ntp or ntpsec it will uninstall timesyncd.

 

Download links

The Raspberry Pi OS download page can be found HERE

ARM64 full version (beta): Here

ARM64 lite version (beta): Here

The arm64 versions are still considered beta, even though they have been available since 2020.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I found "sudo systemctl enable boinc-client" caused the boinc client to fail trying to contact the GUI RPC, & boinc manager lost its list of potential projects, and account managers.
I'm running the 64 bit Bullseye beta.
Thanks for your help,
Rolly.

Mark G James said...

Enabling or disabling the service doesn't effect the GUI RPC's. It tells the operating system if it should automatically start the service or not when you boot the Pi. You can check the status with the command "sudo systemctl status boinc-client". It will tell you if its enabled or disabled and if its running or not.

The GUI RPC come from the BOINC Manager or BOINCtasks, the BOINC Client simply responds to them. If the BOINC client isn't running then the Manager won't get a reply. If you have a firewall then it can also block the port that BOINC uses to communicate.

The prior version of BOINC (with buster) had the service enabled by default. With the bullseye release its disabled by default. When you first install BOINC it will start the service, on subsequent reboots it won't.

Useful commands:
sudo systemctl start boinc-client (start the service)
sudo systemctl stop boinc-client (stop the service)
sudo systemctl restart boinc-client (restart the service if already running)
sudo systemctl status boinc-client (show the status)
sudo systemctl enable boinc-client (set the service to auto-start on boot)
sudo systemctl disable boinc-client (don't auto-start on boot)

Unknown said...

I see the boinc-client running after boot up, but if I run boinc-manager from the System Tools launch menu, it has no idea of any available projects, or account managers, or projects it was working on.
Thanks for replying,
Rolly.

Mark G James said...

Sounds like a password issue. When you start boincmgr you should tell it what the password is. With my full Debian bullseye systems I add a desktop shortcut that has "boincmgr --password xxx" where xxx is whatever is in your /etc/boinc-client/gui_rpc_auth.cfg file.

I'm running the Mate desktop, so the process of adding a desktop shortcut will likely be different to the Pi desktop.