2 Linux Patches Enhance Raspberry Pi's Compatibility and Performance
TapTechNews July 5th news, developers have newly submitted 2 Linux patches, enhancing the compatibility between the Raspberry Pi single-board computer (SBC) and the Linux system, and further improving the operating performance.
TapTechNews briefly introduces the patch contents as follows:
The first patch is to initially add Suspend-To-Idle (s2idle) support for the Arm chip BCM2835.
The BCM2835 is the chip used in the previous versions of Raspberry Pi (from Raspberry Pi 1 to Raspberry Pi 3). Developer Stefan Wahren focuses on optimizing the BCM2835 chip mainly because there is sufficient documentation, and another reason is that it is not as complex as the SoC used in later models.
Linux S2idle is a suspend state defined by the ACPI standard. ACPI is a power management technology used by operating systems to manage the energy of PCs and other computing devices.
ACPI includes four different suspend states (S0, S1, S3, S4), where S4 is the hibernation (suspend-to-disk) state, that is, saving the RAM content to the disk before shutting down.
S2idle allows the machine to enter a frozen mode and stop the device from running. The patch focusing on Raspberry Pi obviously saves a small amount of energy and can save 0.33 watts.
Wahren reports that Raspberry Pi 1 consumes 1.67 watts when not doing anything, and drops to 1.33 watts in the sleep state.
The second patch is to simulate the implementation of NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access).
NUMA is a well-known technology in the Linux field that can optimize memory access by dividing the physical RAM into several blocks.
According to the patch developers, through a specific allocation strategy (such as interleaving), the memory controller used by Raspberry Pi 5 (BCM2712) can better utilize the parallelism of the physical organization of the memory chips.
The final result of NUMA simulation is that the performance of the Raspberry Pi 5 board has been significantly improved. The results of Geekbench 6 show that the single-core performance has increased by 6%, and the multi-core performance has increased by 18%.