Raspberry Pi respin on Pi 4 @ 4 GB thoughts

[skallal]

So I just installed the MX 23 Raspberry Pi respin on my Pi 4 @ 4 GB RAM. Already had the unit for 3 years now. Use it mainly as a file server on my 8 TB USB MyBook drive. It's connected to my LAN via CAT 6 ethernet to a gigabit switch and throughput is decent. It's formatted ext4 and has been solid ever since. In fact it was the Rasberry Pi that got me interested in Linux this time around.

It took me two tries to get the respin to boot properly. Reusing a 32 GB SanDisk Ultra left over from another project.

So far I've gotten VNC and Samba working. Back in September I had difficulty getting a VNC server working my MX 23 XFCE desktop. And one dedicated member here straightened me out. Oddly his instructions worked the first time on the Pi.

However I'm not that impressed with the performance compared to Raspberry Pi OS bullseye. I haven't tried any real numbers tests. But it definitely seems like the official OS is performance better at least in a UI sense than the respin. My 4 GB Pi 4 is the mid level in terms of memory. There are 2, 4, and 8 GB versions of the Pi 4. And at the time 4 GB seemed like plenty. I noticed that also of the users test driving the respin are using the Pi 5 @ 8 GB. So I'd like to know if there are ways to speed up the performance. I've read of Pi users who use the SD card only to boot up and put the main file system on an external drive. Even a USB 3 flash drive might help. Also thought of using part of the USB drive for swap.

So I'd like to hear from anyone using my version of Pi hardware. I'm NOT necessarily complaining. It was an easy installation. But I do think I'm at the lower end of acceptable Pi hardware.

[Jerry3904]

It worked well for us on the Pi 4, in my case with 8GB (not sure about the other testers). There's a lot on the RPi Forum about using a USB, you might want to look around. Check the Official Documentation also on that, and I see there's an image now installable with Imager just for that purpose.

[skallal]

It worked well for us on the Pi 4, in my case with 8GB (not sure about the other testers). There's a lot on the RPi Forum about using a USB, you might want to look around. Check the Official Documentation also on that, and I see there's an image now installable with Imager just for that purpose.

Thanks for the reply!

I tried a USB 3 thumb drive instead of the SD card. The first attempt failed because of a likely bad thumb drive as it was a $5 special on sale. I had a 64 GB USB 3 SanDisk thumb drive available. My Pi 4 already had multi boot capabilities. I went ahead and updated the firmware to be safe.

The performance is similar to Raspberry Pi OS bullseye I was using before this test, which was running from an SD card. The downside is using up all my USB ports on the Pi 4. If I recall correctly, 2 ports are USB 3 and 2 are USB 2. So I have the new boot thumb drive in one port and the 8 TB USB MyBook hard drive on the other port. The keyboard and mouse ports are usually not used as I run it headless.

I have the VNC and SMB services running again. So the next step is to kick the tires and test drive this setup for awhile.

And I'm curious about your Pi 4 test user's RAM size.

[chrispop99]

And I'm curious about your Pi 4 test user's RAM size.

The Pi 4 I used for testing has 4GB RAM.

Chris

[Jerry3904]

@skallal Could you give some specific examples of the sluggishness you are seeing? What apps, what actions, etc? It's difficult for us to address your general concern since we have not seen that on the Pi 4 (though we did on the Pi 400).

Also: could you please post the output of Menu > Quick System Info--just click the "Copy for Forum" button and click to paste it into a post.

[skallal]

@Jerry3904

I once again started from scratch this time back to the SD card. I went into Windows and wiped both partitions on the drive clean and then used the RPi Imager tool. (The reason for using the Windows machine is it has USB 3 ports, while my MX Linux desktop only has USB 2 ports, which is much slower.) This time I used the VNC server from raspi-config. That's was the option I used with the successful USB thumb drive installation. My previous attempt with the SD card used a VNC server solution I use on my x64 MX Linux XFCE desktop. That's the main difference between the successful attempts and the failed ones.

The raspi-config utility installs RealVNC Server which is proprietary and I prefer to avoid. For some reason my manual VNC server solution from my desktop machine must have broken something on my earlier attempt using the SD card. At least that's my working theory. The extreme sluggishness is gone and it roughly matches the performance in Raspberry Pi OS bullseye. So now I have a working setup on my Pi 4 w/ 4 GB RAM running the MX 23 Raspberry Pi respin.

So here's the latest QSI for a working system:

Code: Select all

System:
  Kernel: 6.1.0-rpi7-rpi-v8 arch: aarch64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 12.2.0
    parameters: coherent_pool=1M 8250.nr_uarts=0 snd_bcm2835.enable_headphones=0
    snd_bcm2835.enable_headphones=1 snd_bcm2835.enable_hdmi=1 snd_bcm2835.enable_hdmi=0
    smsc95xx.macaddr=DC:A6:32:8B:05:31 vc_mem.mem_base=0x3ec00000 vc_mem.mem_size=0x40000000
    console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=4f3d088a-02 rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes
    splash rootwait quiet plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles
  Desktop: Xfce v: 4.18.1 tk: Gtk v: 3.24.36 info: xfce4-panel wm: xfwm v: 4.18.0 vt: 7
    dm: LightDM v: 1.26.0 Distro: MX-23.1_rpi_arm64 Libretto Dec 30  2023 base: Debian GNU/Linux 12
    (bookworm)
Machine:
  Type: ARM System: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.2 details: N/A rev: c03112 serial: <filter>
CPU:
  Info: model: N/A variant: cortex-a72 bits: 64 type: MCP arch: ARMv8 family: 8 model-id: 0
    stepping: 3
  Topology: cpus: 1x cores: 4 smt: N/A cache: L1: 320 KiB desc: d-4x32 KiB; i-4x48 KiB
    L2: 1024 KiB desc: 1x1024 KiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 1500 min/max: 600/1500 scaling: driver: cpufreq-dt governor: ondemand cores:
    1: 1500 2: 1500 3: 1500 4: 1500 bogomips: 432
  Features: Use -f option to see features
  Vulnerabilities:
  Type: gather_data_sampling status: Not affected
  Type: itlb_multihit status: Not affected
  Type: l1tf status: Not affected
  Type: mds status: Not affected
  Type: meltdown status: Not affected
  Type: mmio_stale_data status: Not affected
  Type: retbleed status: Not affected
  Type: spec_rstack_overflow status: Not affected
  Type: spec_store_bypass status: Vulnerable
  Type: spectre_v1 mitigation: __user pointer sanitization
  Type: spectre_v2 status: Vulnerable
  Type: srbds status: Not affected
  Type: tsx_async_abort status: Not affected
Graphics:
  Device-1: bcm2711-hdmi0 driver: vc4_hdmi v: N/A bus-ID: N/A chip-ID: brcm:fef00700 class-ID: hdmi
  Device-2: bcm2711-hdmi1 driver: vc4_hdmi v: N/A bus-ID: N/A chip-ID: brcm:fef05700
    class-ID: hdmi
  Device-3: bcm2711-vc5 driver: vc4_drm v: N/A bus-ID: N/A chip-ID: brcm:gpu class-ID: gpu
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.7 compositors: 1: xfwm v: 4.18.0 2: Compton v: 1 driver:
    X: loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev dri: vc4
    gpu: vc4-drm,vc4_crtc,vc4_dpi,vc4_dsi,vc4_firmware_kms,vc4_hdmi,vc4_hvs,vc4_txp,vc4_v3d,vc4_vec
    display-ID: :0.0 screens: 1
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1920x1080 s-dpi: 96 s-size: 508x285mm (20.00x11.22") s-diag: 582mm (22.93")
  Monitor-1: HDMI-A-1 mapped: HDMI-1 model: Asus VE278 serial: <filter> built: 2012
    res: 1920x1080 hz: 60 dpi: 82 gamma: 1.2 size: 598x336mm (23.54x13.23") diag: 686mm (27")
    ratio: 16:9 modes: max: 1920x1080 min: 720x400
  API: OpenGL v: 3.1 Mesa 23.2.1-1~bpo12+rpt2 renderer: V3D 4.2 direct-render: Yes
Audio:
  Device-1: bcm2711-hdmi0 driver: vc4_hdmi bus-ID: N/A chip-ID: brcm:fef00700 class-ID: hdmi
  Device-2: bcm2711-hdmi1 driver: vc4_hdmi bus-ID: N/A chip-ID: brcm:fef05700 class-ID: hdmi
  API: ALSA v: k6.1.0-rpi7-rpi-v8 status: kernel-api tools: alsamixer,amixer
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.0.0 status: active with: 1: pipewire-pulse status: active
    2: wireplumber status: active 3: pipewire-alsa type: plugin 4: pw-jack type: plugin
    tools: pactl,pw-cat,pw-cli,wpctl
Network:
  Device-1: bcm2835-mmc driver: mmc_bcm2835 v: N/A port: N/A bus-ID: N/A chip-ID: brcm:fe300000
    class-ID: mmcnr
  IF: wlan0 state: down mac: <filter>
  Device-2: bcm2711-genet-v5 driver: bcmgenet v: N/A port: N/A bus-ID: N/A chip-ID: brcm:fd580000
    class-ID: ethernet
  IF: eth0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: pl011 driver: uart_pl011 bus-ID: N/A chip-ID: arm:fe201000 class-ID: serial
  Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 rfk-id: 1 state: up address: <filter> bt-v: 3.0 lmp-v: 5.0
    sub-v: 6119 hci-v: 5.0 rev: 17e
  Info: acl-mtu: 1021:8 sco-mtu: 64:1 link-policy: rswitch sniff link-mode: peripheral accept
    service-classes: rendering, capturing, object transfer, audio, telephony
  Device-2: pl011 driver: N/A bus-ID: N/A chip-ID: arm:serial0 class-ID: serial
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 7.31 TiB used: 4.01 TiB (54.9%)
  SMART Message: Required tool smartctl not installed. Check --recommends
  ID-1: /dev/mmcblk0 maj-min: 179:0 model: SK32G size: 29.72 GiB block-size: physical: 512 B
    logical: 512 B type: SSD serial: <filter> scheme: MBR
  ID-2: /dev/sda maj-min: 8:0 type: USB vendor: Western Digital model: WD80EZAZ-11TDBA0
    size: 7.28 TiB block-size: physical: 4096 B logical: 512 B type: HDD rpm: 5400 serial: <filter>
    rev: 4009 scheme: GPT
Partition:
  ID-1: / raw-size: 29.22 GiB size: 28.66 GiB (98.07%) used: 6.75 GiB (23.5%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/mmcblk0p2 maj-min: 179:2
Swap:
  Kernel: swappiness: 15 (default 60) cache-pressure: 100 (default)
  ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 100 MiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2 file: /var/swap
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 52.1 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A
Repos:
  Packages: pm: dpkg pkgs: 1727 libs: 939 tools: apt,apt-get,aptitude,nala,synaptic
  No active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list
  Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list
    1: deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
    2: deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
    3: deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
  Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mx.list
    1: deb [arch=arm64] http://mxrepo.com/mx/repo/ bookworm main non-free
  Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list
    1: deb http://archive.raspberrypi.com/debian/ bookworm main
Info:
  Processes: 265 Uptime: 45m Memory: 3.78 GiB used: 1.57 GiB (41.5%) gpu: 76 MiB Init: systemd
  v: 252 target: graphical (5) default: graphical tool: systemctl Compilers: gcc: 12.2.0 alt: 12
  Client: shell wrapper v: 5.2.15-release inxi: 3.3.26
Boot Mode: BIOS (legacy, CSM, MBR)

[Jerry3904]

@skallal Many thanks for taking the time and effort to go back to the beginning. I'm very happy to know that the sluggishness you were experiencing is gone, and your experience and problem-solving will be useful in our future support efforts.