RPi aarch64 TW Packagers: Thanks! And suggestion.

English Install/Boot/Login
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I run various openSUSE aarch64 distributions on Raspberry Pi-3B and 3B+. I gave up Tumbleweed last year for Leap 15 as Leap was more stable and its drivers worked reliably. But a recent problem with Leap caused me to try fresh installs of Leap and TW as I tried to diagnose the problem. It turned out that the problem was the RPi-3B+ itself (now in a landfill somewhere). But in testing those installs, I found that the latest TW installed and ran flawlessly on the 3B+.

So I did a fresh TW install on a USB3-bootable SSD when my new 3B+ arrived. I installed http://download.opensuse.org/ports/aarch64/tumbleweed/images/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-XFCE-raspberrypi3.aarch64-2019.01.08-Snapshot20190125.raw.xz on a RPI-3B+ with an HP 120GB SSD connected via Insignia USB3-SATA interface (RPi-3B+ pre-initialized via Raspbian for USB booting).

I’ve been running it for a few days now with no problems: USB booting with only the typical need to reset the USB-SATA interface during warm reboot; EN and WiFi work out of the box; XFCE operation is smooth; Firefox, Chromium, and Thunderbird seem perfectly functional. (Though I wish I could Chromecast through Chromium, but that’s a different issue.)

So: Thanks to the team that manages that distribution. You’ve done a great job of putting together a system that the most novice users could install and use easily on the current generation of Raspberry Pi’s.

My only suggestion for possible change so far: increase the size of the SWAP partition from <500MB to at least 1GB, perhaps 2GB. Even on a 16GB µSD, that should be feasible, and certainly it’s reasonable with >32GB medium. But just starting a few programs in GUI mode, I get swap requirements up to 700MB. I knew it would be an issue and so used gparted on a Raspbian system to reduce “/” and increase SWAP to 2GB after the initial TW login, but most novices wouldn’t anticipate that and would run out of swap space pretty quickly opening apps in GUI mode.

Thanks again for your work.

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Hi there :slight_smile:
AFAIK, no special things need to be done for USB booting these days, should work OTB…

Be interesting to see how my systemd zram service runs on the RPi, but you can always create a swapfile as well, or additional swap partition and set priority to use both, or just remove the old from fstab…

Yet to get a B+, still have two 3B’s running Pihole DNS and the other tracking aircraft :wink: The fourth one runs Tumbleweed, but haven’t used it much these days… all mine run without X if needed, I use Twin…

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Hi, Malcolm!

Yes, that’s what I thought. But it didn’t, even from a Raspbian USB drive. I, too, thought it would boot USB with no preparation, and it’s worth a try, but I thought that I should mention that if it doesn’t work, do the OTP.

Be interesting to see how my systemd zram service runs on the RPi, but you can always create a swapfile as well, or additional swap partition and set priority to use both, or just remove the old from fstab…

I considered just adding a swap file, but since I knew this would likely become a problem, I just did it in advance by changing partition size. Most of the time, most users wouldn’t need the extra space beyond the 500MB. But if you’ve had to dedicate storage from “/” for an additional swap file anyway, might as well go ahead and shrink “/” and increase /SWAP, I thought.

Yet to get a B+, still have two 3B’s running Pihole DNS and the other tracking aircraft :wink: The fourth one runs Tumbleweed, but haven’t used it much these days… all mine run without X if needed, I use Twin…

I’m still partial to XFCE for some reason – I guess mostly because I’ve learned my way around in it and it seems pretty responsive on a Pi. If I get this set up for what I want (backup NAS), I’ll probably run it without the GUI.

There were some problems with drivers for the new devices in earlier releases of openSUSE distributions – I had trouble with EN and WiFi both at various times, for example. With this TW, they just worked. Haven’t tried Bluetooth in TW but have the feeling it’ll probably work. Just in general, it feels like the distributions have caught up with the hardware changes between 3B & 3B+, so you could probably install and run on a 3B+ now without a problem.

Pi-3B+ does have faster IO than the 3B, but it’s still a bottleneck. EN is nominally 1GB but tops out at 300Mb/s or so (as I recall from my testing); WiFi comes up at 150Mb/s (per iwconfig). I can’t get better than 25MB/s to 35MB/s to a USB3-attached SSD or to the µSD. That’ll serve well enough for my purposes, if it works at all as a TimeMachine, and things should get much better if a Pi-4 comes out in a year with more memory and faster IO. :wink: I’m mostly interested in TW now because it supports the version of Samba I’d need to run TimeMachine to back up our Macs.