4 GB RAM limit

[jiyong]

RPi4 comes with the option of 8GB RAM.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/ras...fications/

[janat08]

What exactly do you need to run on your computer that 4 GB is not enough?  Granted, in the ARM world, the ecosystem is a bit more limited, but still basic productivity apps are available, and often, if you are not afraid of the terminal, some very light weight alternative to gui apps.  I certainly grant that many web sites can eat space, but there are ways to mitigate that.  

--
Bill

I recently had to use Zoom. Not sure if it was available on my Ubuntu x86 and not having the time  before the call. I installed it on my phone with google play store and every thing worked smoothly with a nice icon on my screen. Later on I downloaded it on Ubuntu X86 and on the terminal did:
sudo apt install zoom-xxx.deb.

This is not user friendly , there is also no icon on  my desktop and I still have to go to the Zoom web page. This is the current state of application support on my latest Ubuntu 64bit installation. As you can see  even Linux X86 is a crap shoot as far as application support is concerned. Linux desktop on ARM is pretty much a dead end.

There're flatpaks, snaps, and on Manjaro aur within which there is nix which doesn't yet build for aarch64, but has a whole bunch of packages and supporting cross compilation with that manager is apparently easy.

---

RPi4 comes with the option of 8GB RAM.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/ras...fications/

There're also phones with that much ram, so this doesn't really fill me with hope, people argue that rpi is fairly closed source so I doubt it will translate into other socs getting 8gb ram.

[zer0sig]

RPi4 comes with the option of 8GB RAM.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/ras...fications/

Apparently, this was just released.

8GB is nice though, and I was considering getting an rpi to fiddle with. It won't keep me from being interested in PINE products - I'll be ordering the PBP and likely a RockPro soon to go with my kickstarter-bought PINE64 A+ 2GB and my OG PINEbook.

Also, it's worth noting that rpi is just now releasing a 64-bit OS. I've been running a 64-bit armbian build on my PINE64 A+ since 2016 I believe.

[NickL]

Has anyone here tried using zRAM to increase the usable memory for the system? It sounds like this would be a way to acceptably boost usable memory up into the 6 to 7GB range at the cost of some CPU overhead.

[PakoSt]

@NickL , absolutely and without any problems so far. I thought zram was enabled by default for awhile now on Manjaro ARM? In either case, you can double-check this package:https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/packages/community/zswap-arm and make additional adjustments: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Imp...m_or_zswap

[NickL]

I look forward to checking it out when my Pinebook shows up!

[PaulQ]

When I was a kid, my computer had 8 kilobytes of RAM. I also walked to school through the snow uphill both ways.

[moonwalkers]

When I was a kid, my computer had 8 kilobytes of RAM. I also walked to school through the snow uphill both ways.

When I was a kid, my first computer had only 300-something (372? Definitely not 320 or 384) bytes of RAM with a bit-serial CPU (that is, performing operations on individual bits rather than 4-, 8-, or more bit words). I could run up to 105 steps long programs on it. There were games too, but the 7-segment vacuum fluorescent display could only show numbers with some odd characters, so those games were mostly played in your own imagination. My commute to school was taking about an hour and involved a half-hour ride in trolley and a half-hour walk (in the winter - through snow, in autumn/spring - through muck)... This is not a competition, somebody always has a bigger.

But if you were trying to say that having experiences of the severe limitations can give you some perspective on issues like "4GiB RAM is too little" - I agree.

P.S.: I'm not that old, just was born in a country that got seriously #$@ked up by communist ideology.

[Syonyk]

Also, it's worth noting that rpi is just now releasing a 64-bit OS. I've been running a 64-bit armbian build on my PINE64 A+ since 2016 I believe.

Have you benchmarked 32-bit vs 64-bit on your various devices? I've run some benchmarks on the Pi3B+ and Pi4, 32-bit vs 64-bit, and 32-bit was consistently faster for most tasks (building things, browser benchmarks, etc - I didn't run spec because that's a pain to get running). A popular article some while ago demonstrated that for things that use 64-bit only instructions, 64-bit is (duh) faster, but in practical use, the gains aren't nearly so obvious. A 32-bit binary will almost always have a smaller memory footprint due to smaller pointers, and will therefore fit in cache better.

Supporting 8GB of physical RAM on 32-bit isn't a problem, because the Pi kernels ship with lpae mode - so they can address something like 40 or 44 bits of physical memory. There's still a per-process memory limit of 4GB (which, IIRC, is split 3G/1G on Linux), but that's not a huge limitation in practical use.

I totally get the desire to run a clean 64-bit OS, and I run one on my PBP, but it's far from clear that it's the better option for a memory limited device.

Has anyone here tried using zRAM to increase the usable memory for the system? It sounds like this would be a way to acceptably boost usable memory up into the 6 to 7GB range at the cost of some CPU overhead.

zram works, I personally prefer zswap but that's a bit of a point of contention around here. Both help a good bit.

[Arwen]

What we really need, is what the x86/x64 side calls multi-library. The ability to run either 32 or 64 bit binaries. Any package loaded, that supplies libraries, would have both. Each non-library package could determine what would be best based on need. Like LibreOffice & Gimp would probably work better as 64 bit binaries. On the other hand, terminal emulators and Vim would probably work just fine as 32 bit binaries.