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Update to bullseyes, 64-bit, NEON, etc

Patchbox OS
#1

Hi !

I’m new to Patchbox (and happy to help if my time permits as I’m an experienced Linux dev, though mostly a kernel person so far).

First, do you plan to respin the image based on Debian Bullseyes ? The current one barfs at apt-get update due to the change to oldstable and is … old :slight_smile:

Then, would it make sense to have a 64-bit spin ? Maybe nor pre-built if it’s too much of a testing burden but maybe using then gen scripts as an option (or is there one I missed already ?). It should perform better on pi3 and 4…

Finally, those newer PIs support NEON vector instructions. Wouldn’t these significantly improve performance of the audio processing plugins if exploited properly ? Are you aware of any work in that area ? (Or maybe newer gcc auto vectorization is already enough to get some benefits ?)

I feel like Pi3/4 are under-utilized when it comes to processing… but it’s just a gut feeling at this point…

#2

Hi, the relevant repositories for building Patchbox OS are here:

We use the Debian release that Raspberry Pi Foundation uses. It’s been a while since last image update, but as far as I can see, it’s still on ‘buster’.

Indeed, the biggest reason to support the same stuff as Raspberry Pi Foundation is because of the limited time we have for all our development initiatives. This way, the amount of testing, debugging and making sure everything works just right is minimized.

The community is free to try things out though - all the necessary stuff is open source anyway. :wink: Let us know if you have any particular questions that we could help out with.

#3

Thanks. Yes, I noticed indeed, the RPi foundation hasn’t updated yet … it’s a bit unfortunate as debian “stable” tends to already be rather … old … to begin with :slight_smile:

I’ll wait and see for now, but if time permit I’ll poke around at making your scripts able to generate a 64-bit image (if nobody beats me to it). I don’t have great hopes for auto-vectorization with gcc 8, but once Bullseyes is out, gcc 10 should be an improvement.

I’m interested to see what kind of performance improvements we can get out of it.

BTW. One drawback of the split of modep into individual debian packages it that it makes it a bit harder to rebuild the whole lot with tweaked compiler settings. I don’t know much about debian packaging (I know more about rpm though I’m a kernel person at heart), but I’ll try to fiddle and see what comes out of it.

Talking of updates… I also noticed MODEP is a bit behind on Mod versions, as a result depends on an older lilv. Do you plan to update it in the near future ? (Or would take pull requests to do so ?) I don’t necessarily have the time right now, but it’s going to be end of year holiday soon enough … :slight_smile:

1 Like
#4

Sure, if you or someone can take on updating it, we’ll accept pull requests. :slight_smile:

The whole lot itself actually are spread across quite different projects anyway though (mod-ui, mod-host being main ones MOD specific, the rest are open source LV2 plugins with MOD guis), so it makes little difference anyway, as each project would still have to be compiled individually, except building as debs reuses Debian’s package manager for taking care of install and uninstall tasks.

For testing purposes though, you may build stuff locally and overwrite the installed files with your own binaries, no need to know much about Debian. :slight_smile:

#5

Here is a thread where some of us got latest mod software running on our patchbox .
In my case I use raspberry os 64bit latest , Just added pi-sound btn and services manually into my installation and I got a kind of “Patchbox” experience without some of the advantages .

I would be thrilled if someone with more knowledge goes ahead and tries to create an image with 64bit/rolling stuff going . I would test it out, since I did not have the courage to continue trying and ended just on raspberry OS