Linux gods at last turn their gaze to Pi 400: Computer-in-a-keyboard receives mainline kernel support with v5.14 Raspberry Pi fans have reasons for cheer this week as support for the Pi 400 showed up in the queue for version 5.14 of the Linux kernel, and hosting outfit Mythic Beasts added overclocked Pi 4s to its Raspberry Pi cloud. Taking the mainline Support in the Linux kernel has been a little tardy for the Pi 400. We first looked at …
8GB Pi 4 Model B is showing as £73.50 inc VAT. chuck in an SD card and PSU and I guess we're at ~£85 a pop, plus the mess of extension leads for the PSUs. So if you're only doing something short term, or experimenting with say a cluster, then may be it is worth it. 'Course if you do buy them outright, you have to be wary of the damn things breeding - I seem to have 3 running full time at home doing various jobs plus the one I tinker with...
"Apart from the novelty factor and educational sector, is there a practical user application?"
Only sort of. There are two reasons I can see for using one of these, but neither are very strong. The best one is insulation--this is in a price range where the competition is likely a VM running on a server. That means you're sharing the hardware, although the hardware is better. If you were worried about a vulnerability in the hypervisor allowing someone to access your data, you might want to run your code on a dedicated server. However, this only sort of works because you're still using network storage and the cloud provider of course has access to anything on your disk if it turns out they're malicious. Most people who distrust hypervisors likely wouldn't accept those either. The second reason is software compatibility--if you had something which didn't work right on other Linux distros but did work on a Pi, this would let you run it. That's most likely to be something compiled for ARM which can't be recompiled for AMD64, although I haven't experienced anything of the kind myself.
"Is it cheaper?"
That depends what you're comparing it with. If you need a VM, then this is in the range but more expensive than the low end of the range. However, those VMs usually have different specs--you often get one virtual core at the low end but it's a faster core. The cloudy Pi 4s are pretty good since they have 8 GB of memory. As long as you can live with the slower processor (much slower on single-core, but the four cores make parallelized things work fine), then it could be price competitive.
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Well actually there is! My Pi 400 is running very happily on Slarm64 - an unofficial port of Slackware64-current (a bit like Slamd64 in the early days of 64-bit!).
Very impressed, so far. I had to do a bit of tweaking to get the bluetooth and wifi going - mainly a question of making sure the right firmware was loaded, but easily sorted.
It is hard to tell if hardware video acceleration is working. The tests say it is, but although 1080 plays fine, it struggles with 4K. But that maybe due to it trying to resize for a 1080 monitor!
What a great little machine!
--
Pete
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