Make Your Raspberry Pi 4 Faster with a 64 Bit Kernel #PiDay #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi

Al Williams on Medium discusses the steps to try out running Linux with a 64 bit kernel and the potential speed improvements.

Will it make a difference? That depends on what you are doing. Working with higher memory loads or USB 3 is probably going to be a bit faster. For some things, it won’t make much of a difference. Especially since all the applications are still running in 32-bit mode.

Just as a quick test, I tried to create a large file on the SD Card:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.dat bs=4096 count=512K

On average, the operation took about 104 seconds with the 32-bit kernel. With the 64-bit kernel it only took 76 seconds. That’s worthwhile, although depending on the task, you could see more or less improvement.

He cautions that not all software will run in a 64-bit environment and the very sensible advice to use a backup of the operating system in case of issues.

See the article here.