(08-25-2022, 07:47 PM)Crimson Nape Wrote: Out of curiosity, what benefit is there by having a 64 bit version?
I appreciate your reply!
There would almost certainly be no "intrinsic" benefit to having a 64-bit version of OSCAR on the Raspberry Pi.
The benefit would be entirely "extrinsic" — because a large portion of Raspberry Pi 4 users are now using the 64-bit OS exclusively. That's partly because the 64-bit OS is the only one that allows full use of RAM on the very popular 4 GB and 8 GB models (each process on the 32-bit OS is limited to a maximum of 3 GB RAM).
So in my case, for example — since my entire Raspberry system is running on the 64-bit OS — I would have to make the considerable effort of creating a totally separate SD card with the 32-bit version of RPi OS — for the sole purpose of running one application (OSCAR). Or, I would have to build the 64-bit version from raw source code — a technically-demanding task with an uncertain outcome (I successfully compiled it last year, but it was quite the project).
As an aside, even though I'm an experienced Linux user, I initially failed to notice the "armhf" in the filename of the OSCAR package I downloaded. As a result, when I went to install it on my 64-bit system, I encountered a series of bizarre error messages that led to a lot of fruitless troubleshooting — until I eventually realized that all of my difficulty was due to the 32-bit / 64-bit mismatch. That confusion, of course, was entirely my fault.
OSCAR is truly outstanding software! A readily-available 64-bit version would greatly expand its adoption on the versatile and low-cost Raspberry platform!