Pi 5 Thoughts

[flysideways]

I'm curious how others are using Pi 5's.

For my Gentoo Pi 5, I have ended up with the stock active cooler and a Pimoroni NVMe Base with a Samsung drive.

I cannot put the exact year on it, but, it out performs a lot of my first Gentoo hardware. I did use a lot of varied stuff. The 330mhz Pentium 2 was fun, took days to emerge stuff. The "Year of the Linux Desktop" is upon us.

Anyhow, the Pi guys have done a good thing here. If only it could be passively cooled and still emerge the big stuff.

[axl]

I can't complain. I switched to a cluster of PIs & an apple mini a while back, where most of the hard compilations are done on the mini. But upgrading to PI5 almost makes the mini pointless now. Even Gnome & Chromium are decent while using.

[szatox]

It got quite expensive.
RPi was meant to be a 35$ computer for children and tinkerers, right? And yet it kinda feels like this very niche of cheap yet versatile and easy to use (though low spec) computers got abandoned. Not that there's anything wrong with making high-spec ARM-boards, it just wasn't the original idea behind rpi and it's not the idea which made rpi so popular, so I think it's going against it's mission and its brand.

Even RPi4 got a bit pricey over time, e.g. an on-board wifi is surely nice to have, but without an external antenna it doesn't work very well inside a full-metal fanless radiator case, so I'd rather not have it at all than pay 5$ premium. Too bad, nobody sells this version even though it is listed as an available option.
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Make Computing Fun Again

[flysideways]

There are presently multiple US retailers showing $35.00 1GB Pi 3B's and 4's in stock for purchase. They still meet the original goal.

Pi Zero W's with pre-soldered headers look to be $15.99 in stock too. The Zero 2 W is still $14.99.

I don't see any of the $10.00 Pi Zeros in stock, but I have used them hooked up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. If you want internet, use a usb dongle that also has an ethernet port.

I'm not sure how the Pi Zero 2 W compares to a late '70's VAX, but it runs gcc just fine.

[flysideways]

On the subject of Pi Zero, why not?

[e8root]

[NeddySeagoon]

e8root

Which stage3 did you use following https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Install_Guide ?

Wayland does not use the VC4 driver on the Pi5. Its all V3D.
My testing with any console or graphics output has been cut short as the video output on my Pi5 has failed. ssh still works though.
I can probably get a serial console going too, if I was pushed, or broke ssh.

My passive cooling solution consists of the PI5 armour case with an original Pentium passive cooler fitted together fins to fins. The technical term is 'graunched' [1]
I get 62C with all 4 cores working hard at stock 2.4GHz. The armour case alone allows the PI to reach thermal throttling.

I'll add a photo to the wiki later.

[1] R.A.F. slang: namely, 'to graunch,' which means 'to make to fit by the use of excessive force.' "
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[e8root]

It was exactly stage3-arm64-desktop-systemd-20240324T235307Z.tar.xz

VC4 vs V3D... yeah, I just meant GPU driver in general. The way I understand it there is one part in the kernel and one in mesa and to be honest I don't remember which is which. Or was it mesa and X11? Probably.

Cooling wise I got this case https://botland.com.pl/img/art/inne/24106_2.jpg today. It has connection with thermal pads to each of the chips, even those two small ones. I have almost the same case for Pi4 and it was always pretty solid, pun intended. I usually keep it on big copper plate and did the same for Pi5.
So far at default parameters with performance governor it runs quite okay while emerging world + making kernel at the same time with temperature after a while hovering at 66'C. Imho not bad at all. Putting more copper plates on top of the case helped bringing temperature well below 60'C.

Initial world emptytree emerge (to get -march=native packages) does take its sweet time. It didn't help I initially started it on some cheap'o microSD card which literally would cause system to get stuck waiting for io for most of the time. I ordered USB3 SATA3 adapter but it won't arrive today so I used USB2 adapter... maybe it isn't the fastest tech out there but emerge actually runs fine and I was easily able to build kernel while emerge was working on its stuff.

Biggest test will be emerging chromium... only after configuring plenty zram swap.
Quickly checked emerge --getbinpkg --ask www-client/chromium and apparently there are some binary packages for aarch64. Chromium itself shows as ebuild though... it would be imho much more useful to have chromium itself as binary package. Especially since on weaker hardware like Rapsberry Pi 3 I don't think it would be possible to build such packages without using cross compilation of sorts.
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Unix Wars - Episode V: AT&T Strikes Back

[e8root]

Played with Gentoo on Pi5 the last two days and my impressions:

1. Simple package x11-wm/fvwm
It could not be installed because it was masked by: missing keyword
What could this magic keyword be?
...