PiOS 64bit Future Compatibility?

Greetings fellow Pimoroni gang,

As I’m sure many of you are aware the Pi Foundation has now released a non-beta version of the 64bit flavour of PiOS. For those who may need it, there is a link to the relevant blog post here.

I wanted to embark on a discussion regarding the compatibility of Pimoroni products, primarily at a software level, moving forward.

It’s completely understandable that porting existing libraries and code to include 64bit compatibility may be no small task.

The intention of the post is not to complain, quite the reverse. But, to stimulate positive discussion of the issue within the Pimoroni community.

If anyone from the company has a free hand to provide some input that would be smashing too! :-)

Yarr, etc.

Interesting topic. I have downloaded the 64 bit version but haven’t yet installed it on a Pi. I’ll likely only run it on one of my 4B’s that has 8 gig of RAM. No big advantage, IMHO, to running it on say a Pi Zero, or any Pi with less than 4 gig of RAM. Not in these early days anyway.
I’d say it will be a long road getting all the Pimoroni Products setup to work on 64 bit. They have some smart people working for them, just not a lot of them. And those that are there are pretty busy as it is. That’s how it seems anyway.
Just about every Pi I own has something connected to the GPIO that won’t work without installing the relevant third party software. Breakout garden stuff mostly.

Exactly. I mostly run a few Enviro and Enviro+ here. A UnicornHatHD, ExplorerHatPro, LED shim, fan shim, and a couple breakouts.

I’ve been doing some testing. Nothing elegant or overly technically complex. Just a simple timed, finding prime numbers up to a limit of 10,000 test, on all cores, repeated 8 times. Run over ssh remotely for minimal overheads on the test Pi.

Even on a Pi3b, (not 3b+) 64bit completes this test 2.25 x faster than 32bit. Technically, no faster, but more efficient.

The Pi4b’s being much the same, across the 2, 4 & 8 Gb variants. I also clocked them all down to the same core frequency, 1.5Ghtz. Though, for point of note, the 3b runs at a lower frequency than the 4b’s, clearly.

Due to the inherent advantages that both bullseye and native 64bit brings. Many users will want to make the switch. Pimoroni’s code base is sizeable. AFAIK, at time of writing only 32bit OS’s are supported.