512MB Raspberry Pis shipping!

512MB Raspberry Pis are now shipping!
I have one:-)

I think it needs a new start.elf hopefully either RISC OS will automatically then use the extra RAM or it will be simple for it to be updated to do so!

n.b. The plural of Raspberry Pi is Raspberry Pis according to the Foundation. But it doesn’t look right does it!

The new start.elf are available on github as of an hour ago. Why not ttry them and see (link from Raspberry Pi ROM image ‘i’ icon on the Software/Essentials page).

Eureka! RISC OS Total 384MB :-)

Stand up and take a bow the man that coded the RAM size part to cope with more RAM!

Wow, now that’s some surprise. Considering how the foundation used to dampen any hopes for more RAM in the past. :-)

That should make linux work a bit better. And perhaps RAM based scrap would help RISC OS.

I’m slightly disappointed at this. I thought the idea behind the Raspberry Pi project was to provide economical computing for all, and a consistent, stable platform to achieve this.

I’m reminded of the ZX81, some stuff needed the extra 1k ram pack to run.
CBM VIC20, some software needed RAM pack fitted, (various sizes!)
ZX Spectrum came with 2 memory configs, 16k + 48k.
Amstrad 664 and a couple of months later 6128.

These differences could be overcome by additional hardware. (Although the cost of each option was much more than a new RPi!)

I appreciate that things move on, but just hope that future projects bear the original in mind, at least for the time being. Adding RAM is not an easy option for early devices.

At least RISC OS doesn’t need huge increases in RAM to function, unlike other OS, but may need it to process ever increasing media requirements.

Actually slightly disappointed by this – one of RISC OS’ strengths was the tiny RAM footprint, making it ideal for smaller memory devices. A 512Mb Pi is more practical for running other OSs, which may limit the appeal / uptake of RISC OS to new users :( Still, for returning RISC OS folks, it makes for a tasty update :)

Oh, I don’t know… Got OvationPro running on a Pi? Power-up to desktop publisher in how many seconds?

Compared with how long it takes the average smartphone to boot… ;-)

Oh, I don’t know… Got OvationPro running on a Pi? Power-up to desktop publisher in how many seconds?
Compared with how long it takes the average smartphone to boot… ;-)

Of course the ARM powered smartphones are clearly running the wrong OS :-)

I can see where you’re coming from, Andrew but wouldn’t it be a little selfish if we denied the R-Pi users more RAM in hope of converting them ;-)

But the truth is, the Pi running linux isn’t really very good as a workstation. Pretty much any PC from the last ten years would perform far better. I would think the extra RAM would change this somewhat.

However I would expect RISC OS to be faster even as is. And that extra RAM could be used to speed RISC OS up.

Amazing to think how long everything takes to start up these days. Whatever the memory, RISC OS should be well positioned on something like the Pi. Surprised with what I perceive as negativity regarding doubling of memory. Applications like Photodesk would benefit from this – pushing pixels ain’t done by magic pixies you know! ;-)

Steve

However I would expect RISC OS to be faster even as is. And that extra RAM could be used to speed RISC OS up.

As an example of where various things can be sped up:

Memphis 3.03¹ run with a configuration to set scrap to run in memory and also to save the scrap to disc at shutdown speeds up Netsurf start and browse by quite a bit.

¹ Although the web site pointed at by Risc OS Info is dead I found a means of getting at² the 32-bit safe version of Memphis and its source.

² Quite a bit of stuff actually and I was intending to buy a large storage device to put things on as a holding place for various abandonware that might only need a tweak or two to be useful again.

negativity regarding doubling of memory.

Only because
1. our existing Pis don’t have it.
2. it closes the gap a little for a usable desktop OS.

Memphis 3.031 run with a configuration to set scrap to run in memory and also to save the scrap to disc at shutdown speeds up Netsurf start and browse by quite a bit.

I use it on my Iyonix, I haven’t set it to save, because I don’t want the rubbish saved, but I have created a little script that copies the rufl thing over, so NS is fast.

Memphis would be nicer if you could tell it what to save and if it could use a directory on the main drive when it runs out of RAM.

(I have to turn it off, if I download big files)

Memphis would be nicer if you could tell it what to save and if it could use a directory on the main drive when it runs out of RAM.

That’s the bit where someone¹ would need to twiddle with the source to make a version that did selective save.

¹ With a clue…

Well RISC OS seems to work at 384Mbytes on a 512Mbyte board – you just need the new arm384_start.elf (15Oct version tested).

Hmmm… you need (to do) a lot more besides that new start.elf (which is nowhere to be found).
In the past RISC OS used to be about ease of use and well documented but todays OS’s are all about chaos and providing misinformation.

So to help the few mortals out there (including myself). The full steps needed to get the 512MB RPI using the full capacity of their board for RiscOS.

I used a windows XP machine to do this but the steps are the same for other OS’s.

What you need.

An SDcard installed with the riscos image from ROOL website (I used BCM2835Dev.5.19.zip downloaded on 25 oct), the firmware source zip with the proper bootfiles for 512Mb cards from gitHub (https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/downloads), patience and some luck.

The page https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/downloads, shows a message that there aren’t any files but you can download the source as ZIP or TAR.GZ. Look for the buttons “download as zip” and “download as tar.gz”. I choose zip and got “raspberrypi-firmware-17c8799.zip”. Unzip this file and you will get a folder with the same name. This folder contains the following subfolders and files.

boot <—- this folder contains what we need later on)
documentation
extra
hardfp
modules
opt
README

Now if you’ve also created a Raspbian “wheezy” SD-card (see: http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads). Then the files that we need can also be found on it’s FAT32 boot partition. At the time of writing this is: 2012-09-18-wheezy-raspbian.

The present (22sept) riscos image creates a 128MB FAT32-boot partitition called “PiBoot”.
the root contains:

arm192_start.elf
arm192_start.elf
bootcode.bin
BOOTCODE_6Sep.BIN
cmdline.txt
config.txt
LOADER.BIN
LOADER~2.BIN
riscos18Sep.img <—- these are the actuall RISC OS kernel.images
riscos22Sep.img <—- these are the actuall RISC OS kernel.images
riscos.img <—- these are the actuall RISC OS kernel.images
start.elf
START_~1.ELF

You can delete everything (or move to a backup folder just in case) except

cmdline.txt
config.txt
riscos18Sep.img
riscos22Sep.img
riscos.img

Then copy from the boot-folder previously mentioned in “raspberrypi-firmware-17c8799” the following files onto the PiBoot partition.

bootcode.bin
fixup.dat
fixup_cd.dat
start.elf
start_cd.elf

Now your PiBoot has the following files:

bootcode.bin
fixup.dat
fixup_cd.dat
start.elf
start_cd.elf
cmdline.txt
config.txt
riscos18Sep.img
riscos22Sep.img
riscos.img

Now the fun part. To tweak the RPI you need to fiddle with the config.txt.

As standard the RPI uses 64MB for the GPU which leaves 448MB system memory to start with. Since RISC OS seems restricted to 32MB video-mem I changed the config.txt to the one below.

#hdmi_mode=16
#arm_freq=800
gpu_mem_256=32
gpu_mem_512=32
hdmi_drive=2
disable_overscan=1
framebuffer_ignore_alpha=1
framebuffer_align=0×100000
init_emmc_clock=100000000
kernel=riscos.img

The lines

gpu_mem_256=32
gpu_mem_512=32

Decide how much memory is reserved for the GPU. In this case both the 256MB and 512MB Raspberry PI restrict gpu memory to 32MB. You can omit the gpu_mem_256 line if you only use it on a 512MB RPI but I’ve added it for completeness. I haven’t tried lower values yet.

The line kernel=riscos.img lets you use a different kernel. To try out the other kernels like riscos22Sep.img just change this line into kernel=riscos22Sep.img

This way you can easy switch between the development kernel and the ‘stable’ one.

I used this procedure a few times at the RISCOS.BE meeting (Belgian RISC OS usersgroup) and it works great.

480MB memory in RISC OS :-)

I really hope this is helpfull. Sorry for my bad english as dutch is my native tongue.

Regards,

Manu T

I played with a few gpu_mem_512= settings.

gpu_mem_512=0 <—- uses the standard RPI 64MB GPU mem and 448MB system mem
gpu_mem_512=1 upto 6 gives 496MB system mem but RISC OS crashes/freezes
gpu_mem_512=16 still freezes
gpu_mem_512=32 give 480MB system memory and no crashes at all.

Hope this is helpfull.

I believe the 16 works providing you don’t try to use 1920×1080, which is of course difficult, because of the (nice) splash screen.

It’s indeed hard to avoid that screen. Which looks terrific. It really shows the work these guys put in it.

Anyway 480MB in RISC OS is still quite a lot considering that the 256MB max. of the Risc PC (or the RPC-SA emulator for that matter) was more than sufficient. I did found it strange that these upgraded START.ELF and associated files weren’t used on the official distribution. But fear not, the instructions above work very well on the ‘official distribution’. Oh, and the clock doesn’t save its choices (but that has been mentioned on other threads as well).

A tip perhaps for the novices. You can see these files from the boot partition from withing RISC OS. They are accessible inside !Boot in the folder “Load”

Perhaps these things can be put inside a FAQ for RISC OS PI if that excists?

Needles to say I’m very pleased with this progress. Using NetSurf is a joy on RISC OS compared to being a drag (literally) on the ‘officialy prefered’ Raspbian.

Thanks to all the people who made this possible.

My guess is they are too new to be sufficiently tested. (And they should be upgradeable via packman, when there is a version they are happy with.)

Also, if support for actually using the GPU ever comes to RISC OS, you’ll want to back off of the amount of RAM assigned to RISC OS, for performance reasons. (IIRC, the config.txt for Raspbian assigns 64 MiB to the GPU by default, which is a sensible default for Linux (where it needs every byte of RAM it can get). 128 would give better GPU performance on RISC OS, and would be fine even in the most extreme situations for total RAM on a 512 MiB RPi, and shouldn’t cause problems for most people on a 256 MiB RPi.

Manu: I don’t know why you had so much hassle. I just downloaded the new start.elf renamed it and it worked!
Eric: Jeffery posted a few days a comment that hardware acceleration for rectangle copy had been added about four weeks ago.

I should say, OpenGL stuff that’s loading textures into VRAM. 2D accelerations like that shouldn’t need much VRAM. (Now, if RISC OS somehow gets a compositing WIMP, then you’ll want more VRAM…)