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Re: Berkeley Pi: Next meeting on Jitsi Sunday the 21st

Quoting tom r lopes (tomrlopes@gmail.com):

> Pi foundation announced the 8GB version of the Pi 4
> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/8gb-raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-at-75/
> So this means now we need a 64bit OS.

In case people are wondering _why_:  32-bit OSes cannot efficiently
address and use more than 4GB of RAM address space.  So, if running a 
32-bit distro like Raspbian on a 8GB or (future) 16GB RPi 4, quite a bit
of the RAM you bought would end up badly used, partially wasted.

The ARM Cortex-A72 CPU used in the RPi 4 series supports both a 64-bit
mode (called 'aarch64') and a 32-bit mode (called 'aarch32').[1]
Technically, these are two execution modes (think of them as
personalities) of the ARMv8 architecture's latest implementation (called
the ARMv8-A spec).  

So, long story short, a Linux distro compiled for the aarch32 CPU
architecture (as is Raspbian) will work fine on any RPi 4, but will suck
at making proper use of any system RAM in excess of 4GB.  OTOH, a Linux
distro compiled for the aarch64 CPU architecture will run even better on
RPi 4 in the sense of doing better at handling 8GB (and in the future
higher) machines.

Doing a search at Distrowatch
(https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=All&category=All&origin=All&basedon=All&notbasedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=aarch64&package=All&rolling=All&isosize=All&netinstall=All&language=All&defaultinit=All&status=Active#simple)
suggests these open source *ix options (including BSD in addition to
Linux):

Manjaro Linux
Debian GNU/Linux
Fedora
KDE neon
CentOS
openSUSE
Ubuntu Kylin
FreeBSD
Q4OS
Alpine Linux
Ubuntu MATE
Void Linux
Mageia
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Netrunner
ALT Linux
Raspberry Pi OS  (in beta, which Thomas described)
Oracle Linux
Funtoo Linux
Bedrock Linux
Fugulta
Proton OS

aarch64 distros that Distrowatch hasn't yet caught up with, sucn as
Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS and 18.04, and also Arch Linux ARM, Gentoo,
Blackarch, BalenaOS, EasyOS, and Linaro, are not yet included in
Distrowatch search results (but should be).

[1] The Linux kernel developers and Debian have so far chosen to refer
to aarch64 by the name 'ARM64'.  Everyone else, to my knowledge, as
followed the lead of the GCC developers, who invented the name
'aarch54':  Doing cross-compilation for aarch64 Linux in GCC requires
specifying target architecture 'aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc'.

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