rpi3 experience

[axl]

so I finally got around to buying a rpi3 board. and am so happy i need to post this.

first thing i wanted to try, was usb boot. i heard (or otherwise read in the instructions - ohhh your pi doesn't do that...) pi can boot of usb now. and it does.

second. wanted to see a ssd experience on pi that actually worked. for a variety of reasons, i never had a good pi that worked well with a ssd. well, usb/sata convertor. power supply. a whole mess of problems.

third. I dont know if 64 bit thingie matters a lot.

But i'm very proud of my new rpi3, working on an xfs partition, on a ssd drive, connected to usb, in 64bit mode. which is also the boot drive (finally no more sd cards). and everything works like... it's a mediocre laptop. which is amazingly fast for a pi.

[AJM]

It really has matured into a very useful low cost general purpose computer, hasn't it? I've been using Raspberry Pis as thin clients since they first became available and they've just got steadily better - it's not like there aren't areas that could be much improved, but for the money they're great.

Are you running Gentoo on yours? Up until recently I had just used Raspbian on Pis out of laziness, until this time round I discovered I couldn't get remmina to successfully open a new NX session no matter what I did. Having noticed the 64 bit Gentoo image on the forum and approaching desperation I gave it a go and it's worked brilliantly - a bit slow to compile updates of course (though not slow enough to make me bother building packages on a PC.)

The lack of systemd and general "cleanness" of Gentoo is such a breath of fresh air though.

[axl]

Same as you I had Pi's since version one. At first just as an addon for Lego NXT/Mindstorms, then in media centers, 3d printer and other robots as well. The last one I bought I haven't decided what to do with it yet. It was mostly on trial basis. Wanted to see, like i mentioned, the USB boot, no sd card, with external ssd. Most of my PI's use NFS as root partitions because of the many sd cards that broke over the years.

I tried to use gentoo exclusively... at first. But like I mentioned, so many lost hours of work getting everything right and few months later... boom. card gone. So over the years I migrated most of them on raspbian, nfs root, and only a small vfat boot partition. Much easier.

[szatox]

[axl]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SATA-3-speed-connects-USB-3-0-to-external-2-5-SATA-6G-Hard-Drive-Cable-Adapter-/381944366675

Yes usb convertor. Nothing fancy. The usb on pi is just usb2, but the performance is decent. I never used a fast usb stick, so don't know how fast those work.

But I can relate to the mmc cards, nfs storage and finally this solution. Especially when you compile a gentoo distro from scratch.

Like i said before, you get the feeling you are in front of a lazy mediocre old laptop.

[axl]

what they dont tell you (as of 3 may 2017) is that ... not the entire raspberrypi-userland is 64 bit ready. some of the components are really 32 bit and it requires some kernel work and userland work that goes on since the pi 3 was released.

from what i read... 64 bit kernel a year ago was hard. for me it was just git, crossdev, distcc, compile... well ok. its not easy but neither hard.

however, access to mmal in 64 bit mode... nono. just nono. no.

which kinda makes the whole thing pointless at this point. they have a special "arm64_buildwhatspossible" flag. dont remember it. but the point is, the platform works, but the hardware... hardly.

even the usb host is completely disabled in 4.10 series and below. in arm64. for whatever reason. things must have been awefull a year ago.

it's still very good at booting of usb and being host for lesser pi's. u can boot 64 mode. use a proper ssd. use distcc. compile stuff for arm7&6 way faster than on their respective platform. so yeah. sux that mmal doesn't work in 64 bit mode. i expect by next year it will. way better than that asus tinkerboard flop

[NeddySeagoon]

axl,

A year ago it was tough running arm64 on a Pi 3.
A one core and a serial console was all there was.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[axl]

like i mentioned, i read the same thing.

maybe you were one of the early settlers. thank you for your effort.

[axl]

I was just trying to contain my excitement for the progress rpf made this year, and it's followers, but also my anxiousness about 64 bit tools.

really no sarcasm. honestly. i love you guys.