Does Raspbian have full access to the Debian repositories? Are there any other disadvantages to Raspbian?

Hi,

It is good news to hear that a Raspbian build is on its way. Did any of the other developments, e.g.:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=9260&p=107698&hilit=libc+raspbian#p107698

make it into Dom’s setup?

Thanks and best regards, Will

(Sidenote: The link in your post to ‘view forum’ takes you to the wrong page)

Quick query on the overclocking. Is it fairly stable or is there a huge heat issue? I’m guessing with a nice little metal heatsink on the SOC it would allow for a small amount of overclocking with little to no issue, would it not?

There’s a warranty?!!

BTW – I had no idea FP wasn’t being done in hardware. It might speed up the SDR stuff I’ve played with — nice!

will asb’s raspi-config be in the raspbian image?

I’ve been doing a lot of benchmarking of the Pi over the past few days.

Benefits from the hardfloat optimisations in Raspbian are easily quantifiable.

The media tests seemed to get the greatest benefit, up to 30% decoding performance for MP3s. This is significant because it might help XBMC decode DTS audio and fix some stuttering.

Interface rendering tasks within X were ~18% quicker, which should help make the GUI feel smoother.

Quake 3 gained 2.8 FPS (about 12%).

I’ll do a blog post once all of the results are final :)

RE: “Debian vs Raspbian”: Raspbian is basically just Debian compiled specifically for the ARM version in the Pi, so there are almost no negative points. It is the natural evolution of running the ARMv6 armel version. It’s entirely possible that it’ll be absorbed back into Debian if the userbase gets large enough to justify Debian’s resources in maintaining another architecture.

The two existing ARM architectures supported by Debian are either too old (armel is ARMv4) or too new (Debian’s existing “armhf” is for ARMv7).

Strictly speaking there are two options: Over-clocking and over-voltage. Overclocking does not void your warranty but over-voltage does! The speed which Dom gets, is by doing both because you can run a lot fast at a higher voltage but the life span of your device will reduce. I know the next question: how much? There is no really good answer to that question. The estimate is that it reduces it by half. Disclaimer: the following is just a ball-park of an approximate of a guess of an estimate: Your normal BCM2835 lifespan is estimated to be about 40 years. No: you can not hold me to that if you manage to blow it up in two years or in two hours! As soon as you over voltage your warranty is void even if it blows up ten milliseconds later. (I am luckily not a member of the Foundation as they would never be able to say things like that)

I haven’t gotten my RPi yet so it’s hard for me to see the improvements without a comparison. Also, is loading external sites the best way to determine OS performance improvements? Seems like there are too many other variables (broadband speed, site servers, etc).

Small gripe aside, thanks for working on improvements! I guess I’d rather people like Dom’s time be spent on actual improvements vs a better benchmark video :)

Which kernel will it use 3.1.? or 3.2.?
In particular will it have I2C & SPI drivers in?
and DS 1307/1338 RealTime Clock?

Sweet! Looking forward to a speed boost! Somebody should do a before/after video :)

Btw, approximately what % increase in performance does this mean?

Hi, will the kernel have PPP filtering enabled? (I really don’t want to compile my own kernel – I don’t even know how :D )

Just read the 24 page forum sticky post of project history and some earlier history. Amazed to see what method and energy have wrought. Last link below is for shouting out that this is very “worthwhile and useful to people”.

Home: http://www.raspbian.org/

Forum: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=66

Ongoing dev history: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=4256

Defraying out of pocket project costs: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=7525&p=107812

Nice, looking forward to it. What shape is ALSA in right now?

Congrats to Mike Thompson on all the hard work he’s done in getting Raspbian to this stage!

Gentoo is also available for the raspberrypi. Just write the available image to your sd card and there you have it!

Soon the binary repositories will be popping up like mushrooms and everything is ofcourse fully optimised for the pi.

Yup it has hardfloat from the start:)

Think you should do more to thank Mike Thompson for his efforts on creating Raspbian.

I don’t fully understand what exactly the “floating point” stuff is… But will this affect everything speed-wise, or just certain applications that utilize this?

Fanatastic work! the results speak for themselves.
It’s a shame the cap is out for donations for expenses – surely the Foundation should chip in now.
On details of what has been done – could someone write a description of how and what was done – (maybe this would make a great article for magpi) – I’ll find it a lot more interesting than instructions on how to run XBMC..

Best wishes to all.

Floating-point is also known by its earlier incantation, “scientific notation”, a handier way to express very large or very small values without having to carry around a football field sized whiteboard full of integer digits (does anyone even use blackboards and chalk anymore?). For example, the distance from the Earth to the Sun is a mean value of 149,597,870,700 meters, or 92,955,807.273 statute miles. These can be represented in floating-point as 1.49597870700 x 10^11 meters, or 9.2955807273 x 10^7 statute miles. The up-caret (^) means “to the power of”, so, these are decimal numbers (base 10) raised to the power of 11 and 7, respectively. This makes multiplication, division, and other calculations somewhat easier, as you just move the decimal point right or left to make the exponent (7 or 11) the same as that of the other number, and then you can multiply/divide/whatever the mantissas are (the numbers with the decimal points to the left of the “x 10^”).

There are three kinds of numbers most commonly represented in your computer, binary (0 and 1), integer ( … -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, … ), and floating point (e.g., Pi: 3.14159 … , e: 2.71828 … , the aforementioned distance from the Earth to the Sun, aka one Astronomical Unit, AU, etc.). There are actually an infinite number of other numerical representations possible, but, these will do, for our purposes.

Everything in the computer is actually represented physically in binary – a voltage below a defined threshold represents a 0 and a voltage above that threshold represents a 1. If you string a bunch of these 0s and 1s together, you can start to represent other number systems. The Raspberry Pi has a 32-bit microprocessor, of which the CPU is only one part (others are the arithmetic logic unit, memory management unit, etc.). Integer numbers are typically expressed in chunks of 8, 16, or 32 bits (aka bytes, short words, and long words – there can be other names, but, let’s keep things simple). The range of integer values depends on how you interpret the bytes and words: an 8-bit byte can represent either 0 to 255 or -128 to +127, a 16-bit short word can represent either 0 to 65,535, or −32,768 to +32,767, and a 32-bit long word can represent 0 to 4,294,967,295 or -2,147,483,648 to +2,147,483,647. Notice in each case that 0 is one of the numbers, that’s why the negative and positive ranges are different by one – it’s taking up one of the values available. Representing integers is fairly straightforward in digital electronics.

Representing floating-point numbers is much more involved, and you basically have to keep track of the mantissas (the numbers with the decimal points in them), the base (10 in this case), and the exponents (the power 10 is being raised to – which can be positive, negative, or zero, BTW). There is a standard used called the IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Floating-Point Standard and it comes in three flavors today: 32-bit (single-precision), 64-bit (double-precision), and 128-bit (quadruple-precision). The sign, mantissa, and exponents are encoded within these bits, and in the case of 32-bit single-precision: the sign, 1 bit, the
exponent, 8 bits, and the mantissa (aka significand), the remaining 24 bits (only 23 are actually stored, but, the extra bit allows for detecting overflow and underflow cases after a calculation). The special part of the microprocessor in the Pi that handles floating-point calculations is called, oddly enough, the floating-point unit (FPU), and this is where floating-point calculations are generally carried out. I will point out that the largest part of the microprocessor in the Pi is actually the graphics processing unit (GPU), and many more floating-point calculations are performed there, at a much faster rate than in the FPU, but, in a special format peculiar to 3-D graphics (x, y, and z coordinates, along with color values, transparency, and a bunch of other things we can cover in another lesson).

Up until Raspbian was created, all of the floating-point calculations in the Pi microprocessor (except 3-D graphics and video) were actually being performed in software on the ARM CPU portion, not the FPU. That means that the IEEE standard was being loaded into one, two, or four sets of memory locations and registers on the CPU and the bits were manipulated in many steps to come up with each answer. In Raspbian, they have recompiled the operating system and all other software that contains floating-point numbers and calculations from so-called “armel” code to “armhf”. “armel” stands for “ARM EABI Little, where EABI stands for Embedded Abstract Binary Interface (a way to perform complicated calculations in software). “Little” refers to “little-endian”, which has nothing to do with cowboys, and tells us what order bytes are loaded into the microprocessor, memory, etc. “armhf” stands for “ARM hardware floating-point”. So, floating-point calculations are executed in the FPU in Raspbian (“armhf”), which is much faster – tens to hundreds of percent faster than “armel” for common computations, and up to hundreds of times faster for more exotic things like sines, cosines, tangents, and many more even fancier math functions.

So, you may ask how is the Midori browser being sped up by using the FPU – isn’t text represented by individual bytes, which are sort of like fixed-sized integers? It turns out that the vast majority of text displayed in a browser is actually drawn as outlines that are then filled in with pixels of various shades, and the images are scaled to fit in the space available in the browser window, as defined by HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. When you resize the browser window, or move the slider(s) along the browser window edge(s), the text and graphics may need to be “reflowed” to accommodate the change in window size, aspect ratio, and amount of scrolling. By using the FPU, every single letter of text is redrawn very quickly, possibly in a different position relative to other text than before. Also, the text and graphics can be expanded or shrunk very rapidly, especially if you’re zooming the page in or out. There are other things that may be happening, too, such as clipping where things overlap (e.g., another window on the desktop), but, we’ll talk about that some other time.

I hope this is of at least a little bit of help. Others will probably have additional comments, and I would just encourage them to not make things even more confusing than I may have.

Arghhhh! There are so many exciting things going on and many ideas to test or just to follow the demos… and me I am still waiting those 11 weeks to get my Raspberry Pi! :angry:

You know the insurance commercial that refers to one of it’s customers as being on a ramen noodle budget? That’s me. So for the time being, I must withhold the pleasure of owning one of these—but as soon as I find the money or the job, then I place the order! :) The good news is that things keep getting better while I suffer and wait! Oh, by the way for those who don’t know the reference, ramen noodles are very cheap dried noodles that you boil up in a couple of cups of water and dump powdered flavoring over. Usually less than $1.00 per pack, sometimes on sale—money saved goes towards eventual purchase of much wanted if not actually needed tech like this!

was wondering why my pi was slow… maybe I’ll pick up a larger SD card to load it onto… Suggestion, can the Distro startup expand to the full size of an SD card reguardless of size? I had to take out my 4GB card and move the swap partition and expanded the main partition to make use of the rest of the empty space.

Does this new build of Raspbian use the GPU fully or is that still a WIP?

Looking forward to this release. Didn’t quite get round to updating my SD cards with Wheezy so I’ll wait for this release and do them then.

Does every linux (meaning for arm board, puppy and the like )can use this hardfloating thing ? :)

Does this new update take advantage of the GPU now? The main reason I prefer Raspbmc over debian is because of this.

Please, please, please…include in the downloadable distribution all those packages needed in order to use as many different usb dongles and routers as possible.

A lot of people is having issues connecting the Pi to the internet.
Please consider this, all other packages can be downloaded once the user has internet access on the machine…but first you HAVE to have connection.

If you have to work on one single issue, it should be IMO, having internet working “out of the box”.

Thanks for sharing. But this is merely a “demonstration” rather than a complete intense profiling / instrucmentation / benchmark whichever name u want to use, to show that it’s faster.
Although I agree that making it 1Ghz will be faster (no duh)…..

Does Raspbmc utilize hardfloat?

Not exactly connected to debian. But I ran nbench app on ArchLinux on stock clocks aswell with CPU clocked to 1GHz and SDARM to 500MHz. Overclocking resulted in about 50% more speed. I do not know what code paths nbecnh tests so the 50% speed up might not apply to every application, ecspecially to those that depend a lot on file I/O.
Here are the results. Mayby someone could run the same nbench app on the current debian image aswell as in raspbian.

Here are the results
http://ompldr.org/vZXFmNw

May be dipping the PI in liquid nitogen may help with over clocking process!!!! :)

The password generater for this post seems to be getting abit rude ‘FUCkOkhSHW’

You can think of floating point numbers as a kind of decimal number or scientific notation. Now, just like any integers, there are algorithms (methods or recipes) for doing operations such as adding/subtracting, multiplying, dividing, etc. You know, add these two digits, borrow from that one, carry the two, and so on.

With hardware support, these operations happen pretty much instantly, because the hardware does them. With only software support, the operations must be carried out one by one by the CPU. This of course is slower.

As you can imagine, a lot of software uses floating point numbers. Not just math software, but almost any software you can think of. Therefore, it’s a huge benefit to get it supported in hardware.

Hope this helps!

Neato!

When I moved from Squeeze to Wheezy, I used a spare SD card and didn’t overwrite Squeeze. Now I’m thinking I’ll just get new cards for each big release like this so that I can go back and see how differently they all play out as the OS develops.

Once an official release is made, will those of us currently running “wheezy” be able to “upgrade” to hard-float by means of the “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade” process?

I realise that depending on your installation there may be a lot of files downloaded by this process but it would make things easier for those of us who’ve configured their “pi” to boot from SD but have a USB drive for the rest of the “/” files etc.

I’ve got a feeling I know the answer to this already but I’m living in hope.

Also, does anyone have the relevant “sources.list” entries so that I can get the source code for some of the packages I’ve installed via “apt-get” and “aptitude”?

Thanks again,

Mark.

Why are Raspberry Pi not baked here in the UK? You are selling out our manufacturing sector

[…] That’s exactly what Raspberry Pi developer Dom did before shooting this video showing the computer running a web browser. […]

Wondering if anyone can think of a solid way to quickly migrate my debian system to raspbian? I’ve customized a lot of things and I’d like to be able to quickly transfer my package list/modified files/etc.

Just got my Debian ‘Squeeze’ to run almost identical to this (I emphasize almost) by making various tweaks, plus I only overclocked to 900MHz, and no over volting. Oh, and I’m running it on a class 4 4GB SDHC card :P

As a life-long MSDOSser, who considered LINUX to be a Portal to an Alternative Universe, now in my retirement I look forward to find out what all the noise is about. I hear lots of talk about Raspberry pi being the successor to the BBC computer, but I must warn that Linux had not yet been born back then, OS’s if you could call them that, were based on Z80, 8080, 6800, or 68000 microchip codes, and running with BASIC. I only mention this because people like myself may find difficulty in converting, and the youngsters may think they have been thrown in the deep-end. Never the less good luck on a worthwhile project.

The updated version of the Midori web browser with Raspbian not only improves speed with the FPU, you also get decent support for JavaScript. It can even handle some animation with JavaScript.

I built a Information Radiator with my Raspberry Pi (http://hindsighttesting.com/blog/2012/06/01/raspberry-pi-jira-information-raditor/), which just renders a lot of project information to a big screen using a web page and lots of JavaScript. The old version of Midori struggled to even load the page, let alone render or animate any information. I switched to Raspbian and it solved the problem and we even got some very simple animation working with JavaScript

I have been enjoying my pi for a few weeks now, but am frustrated by not being able to figure out how to get Javascript running in Midori, or the ability to use any flash/html5 video links in Netsurf or chromium. Am I missing something?