Re: [tlug] GW projects

[Stephen Lasseter <stephen@karasu.ninja>]

Hi Curt,

One huge change with the rp4 is that the NIC no longer runs on the USB bus as in previous models.  This had been a significant bottleneck.  It also now has gigabit ethernet.  In terms of performance, the jump from rp3 to rp4 is massive.

I have heard folks having luck now booting from a connected SSD (over USB) rather than SD card.  The SD card has been the source of both performance and stability problems in the past, so this is great news.

I don't have one of these yet, but I'm also excited to find that our friends at Canonical have put in a lot of effort into supporting the rp4 and I hear that their latest Ubuntu for it is solid.  I'm not much of an Ubuntu user myself at the moment, but I'd prefer that over Raspbian for my use cases.

https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi

But, if you need even better performance for this form factor, you may want to look into the Rock Pro 64.  I'm toying with the idea of getting one myself and using it to replace my old AppleTV with a nice, fast Kodi/Jellyjin client for the living room TV.

https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/

Stephen

On 2020-04-28 10:12 a.m., Curt J. Sampson wrote:

> On 2020-04-28 03:06 +0900 (Tue), Benjamin Kowarsch wrote:
>
> > Do you have an rp3, too? I would be very interested to hear from you how
> > the rp4 compares to the rp3 performance wise. I have got an rp3 but found
> > it wanting for the kinds of things I might have done with it.
> >       
> What kinds of things were you wanting to do with it?
>
> I have various Raspberry PIs (a couple of Zeros and others from the
> 2/3 series). The biggest performance issue I've had with them is block
> device I/O. In particular, the SD card is dog-slow, which is bad
> because that's usually the main filesystem. USB 3 is better, but still
> nothing near a good SATA drive.
>
> So while RPis are fine for dedicated/embedded applications (generally,
> non-real-time ones that require a lot of CPU), they aren't really
> suitable for, e.g., a desktop Linux system you can put in your pocket.
>
> cjs
>