Slashdot Mirror
Debian Derivative Optimized for the Raspbery Pi Released
sfcrazy writes "The Raspberry Pi foundation has announced the release of the first SD card image based on the Raspbian distribution. The image will make it easier for Raspberry Pi users to switch from 'generic' Debian Squeeze to this 'optimized' image."
The new image is based on Wheezy and optimized for ARM with floating point instructions, and supersedes the Squeeze based soft float image. Benchmarks show much improvement in performance, and the updated software in Wheezy generally improves the usability of the Raspberry Pi.
The bigger performance problem so far are the X window system device drivers.
Right now it seems the driver is just a frame-buffer driver and the CPU does all the work,
and is not using the GPU.
Until they write accelerated drivers, the performance will by slow.
Unless you just want a phone that works and costs $35. Not everyone has unlimited money to buy phones that have processing power that mostly exists for bragging rights.
Because its optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware and the tweaks it uses are likely to be near worthless for most other hardware. Its like all the distributions that were coming out for the EEE PC (first low cost netbook to gain popularity) which had the main advantage of being really easy to install/use on the particular platform. In other words, instead of spending a few hours configuring Debian to optimize it for my hardware I can just install a simple OS.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
They haven't changed much code, only recompiled it with different settings, so there isn't anything to push back to Debian.
This leads one to the question... underpowered for what exactly?
Buy the right hardware for your project. If this doesn't fit then don't buy it. Buy the ODroid-X, which is a quad core 1.4 Ghz if that is better.
PI is giving me a platform to cheaply learn some stuff, so it fits my needs fine.
It is weird when you are fixing someones XP pc and you realize that your phone has 2x the memory, a faster processor and screen with slightly more pixels than theirs. A good kind of weird.
Why not contribute the changes you make back to main line Debian?
Well it's not much of a fork, much more a port.
The debian foundation has two ARM binary versions, the 'performance' version (armhf) that's compiled for ARMv7 or better chips, and the 'compatible' (armel) version that's compiled for IIRC ARMv4 or better.
One of the reasons the pi is so cheap is it uses an older SoC, based on ARMv6. The cortex chipsets A9 you see in say, the iphone or samsung SoC are ARMv7 instruction set based. So up to now, the standard raspberry pi debian distro was the vanilla armel squeeze, with a wheezy armel beta. However, the pi ARMv6 does have floating point hardware that allows for 'hardfloat' compilation rather than the 'softfloat' compilation option - which is used in the ARMv7 version of debian, but not the armel version. Using the hardware support for floating point calculation is obviously faster than doing it in software emulation, thus the new port to take advantage of every little bit of performance you can get out of the $5 SoC on the pi.
So raspbian is basically debian ARM, but all the binary packages have been recompiled with the hardfloat option to take advantage of the floating point hardware; they're using wheezy as the target, which is current debian testing IIRC. It's debian armhf, but compatible with the v6 pi. The Debian Foundation weren't interested in supporting a 3rd version of debian on ARM hardware, which is entirely fair enough - the amount of people interested in an ARMv6 with hardfloat who aren't using the pi is going to be very small, though they can of course run raspbian on their hardware too if they also have ARMv6 with hardware floating point; it's not like debian are rolling in money themselves. They were happy for a 'roll your own' version though, which is what has happened.
Last I checked, the raspbian project team (which is basically two guys) had successfully compiled basically everything in the debian package tree, along with keeping up to date with the constantly changing nature of debian testing; they had a compile farm running continuously to keep up, and the setup is worth reading about when the raspbian site comes back; it's a tiny operation that's giving hundreds of thousands of pi owners a significantly faster default distro on a shoestring budget. I think it's brilliant, and is an excellent example of why open source is so awesome. Want an entire OS and software custom compiled to get every ounce of performance out of the hardware? Go for it! And look, these guys have done it for you!
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.