The Raspberry Pi hardware has included a 64-bit processor since the Pi 3 launched in early 2016, but the Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) has remained mostly 32-bit. However, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been testing a 64-bit OS since 2020, and today the organization announced that 64-bit is moving out of beta and is now a fully supported OS option on all 64-bit Pi hardware. This includes Pi 3, Pi 4, Pi Zero 2 W and all their variants.
The most significant benefit of a 64-bit switch will be software compatibility, since, as the Pi Foundation notes, “many closed source applications are only available for ARM64”, and open source applications are not always fully optimized for the instruction set that a 32-bit switch uses. Pi OS.
The Pi Foundation post also talks about the performance benefits of 64-bit ARM processors and the underlying ARMv8 instruction set, noting that these benefits are “most visible in benchmarks”at the moment. It also mentions the ability for individual processes to address more than 4GB of RAM, although the Large Physical Address Extension (LPAE) feature already allows each individual process on a 32-bit Pi OS to access 3GB of memory.
At the time of this writing, there are only two versions of the 64-bit Pi OS image available: a “light”version that does not come with a pre-installed desktop environment or apps, and a version with a desktop and minimal pre-installed apps. -installed. The “desktop with recommended apps”version of the OS isn’t available in 64-bit yet, so you’ll need to install things like LibreOffice and your preferred development tools yourself. The 64-bit versions of the images are actually slightly smaller in file size than their 32-bit counterparts, presumably because they don’t need to support the full range of Pi hardware like 32-bit images do.
The 32-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS image is not going away and it is still supported on both 32-bit and 64-bit Pi devices for anyone who prefers or needs it – old Pi and Pi 2 boards from 32 -bit processors. remain fully supported. You’ll also have to stick with the 32-bit version if you’re running a “legacy”version of the Raspberry Pi OS, which still uses Debian 10 (“Buster”) as its base instead of the newer Debian 11 (“Bullseye “).).
All Raspberry Pi OS images can be downloaded from the Pi Foundation website.