Slashdot Mirror
Raspbian Linux OS Gets Major Update, Adds Bluetooth Support to Pi 3 (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Raspberry Pi 3 was launched with built-in chip for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support, however, software support for Bluetooth was lacking until now. The drivers were there, but today's update to the Raspbian Linux distribution adds much-needed GUI tools to help you establish Bluetooth connections. Another cool addition is a new backup tool. There are other improvements as well including the mouse settings, and the ability to empty the wastebasket through right-clicking as seen below (yes, seriously). There is even a new shutdown dialog, something even casual users should notice.Official blog post here.
Raspberry Pi 3 can't get updates, LOL. The story is about Raspbian, the Debian-based OS for Raspberry Pi. Here's the official announcement https://www.raspberrypi.org/bl... from where betanews "borrowed" the images and text in the exact same format :/ Note to the editor: if you want to write something, at least make it a little bit different than the official post.
No, Mike and I built Raspbian. The raspberry pi foundation then built their images from raspbian packages and their own customisations on top (just as prior to raspbian they had built images from Debian with their own customisations on top). Gradually the volume of customisations they apply has increased.
This article is entirely about customisations they apply on top of raspbian.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
To clarify
The arm cores on the Raspberry Pi 3 are 64-bit capable (it's a quad-core A53 cluster).
The core bus system and memory controller are limited to 1GB (it uses the upper bits as flags).
By default the firmware starts the arm cores in 32-bit mode. There is an option in config.txt to change this.
There is a small peice of arm-side init code that normally runs after the firmware brings the arm out of reset but before the kernel loads. This is 32-bit only but can be disabled by options in config.txt.
Community members have got a 64-bit kernel and u-boot working (u-boot replaces the functionality that was provided by the arm-side init code). AIUI it's still pretty experimental though.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Actually you get quite a bit of advantage. The instruction set for 64 bit mode is quite a bit more efficient even when you're not doing 64 bit arithmetic, not least because there are twice as many registers. Code that can be optimised using the SIMD instructions also gets twice as many SIMD registers, which can make a big difference for many graphics, signal processing and mathematical tasks. Most floating point code will be more efficient in 64 bit mode too.
Furthermore the 64 bit address space is useful even with only 1GB of RAM since it allows you to mmap files that are bigger than 4GB. Programs like MongoDB mmap their database files and when running on 32 bit processors MongoDB actually limits processes to a total of 2GB of data in the database, irrespective of how small the working set is. With a 64 bit address space the limit goes from below typical storage sizes to far beyond any plausible storage you'll ever connect to a Pi.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
The onboard Ethernet is via a USB to Ethernet controller which also works as a USB hub. Limited to not just USB 2 speeds, but also controlled by the CPU in software to do the networking. Plug in a USB hard drive, if that's in use your Ethernet slows down. The CPU only has one USB I/O.