The RPI3 is 32bit. Is there going to be a 32bit version of Kinetic for ARM?
There are Xenial armhf builds. I’m kind of disappointed to hear that it seems that the Raspberry Pi community has not started supporting aarch64 images. Why have the armv8 chip and not use it.
yes, the Kinetic buildfarm does armhf and arm64 builds for both Jessie and Xenial. It’s a lower priority to support Debian and ARM builds in the initial release, but we do encourage maintainers to fix platform-specific problems that the build farm finds.
Unfortunately we have only demonstrated the ability to build armhf and arm64 for Xenial and Jessie both. However we’ve tried to pick a covering set by turning on Jessie arm64 and Xenial armhf.
We can consider changing the supported architectures, however we need to trade off the costs of running the buildfarm. Note that the armhf and arm64 builds take close to an order of magnitude more server time.
As far as I understand it, Raspbian doesn’t have any builds that target an architecture above armv6 with hard float. (The original Raspberry Pi). They didn’t want to support multiple arch builds, and they don’t want to confuse beginners.
Other than not wanting to confuse people, the RPI has some reasons to not run 64bit software.
The Pi 3 only has 1GB of ram, so going to 64bit will consume more of that memory storing pointers.
The speedup of the clock is enough to justify going to the newer chip, even if the newer 64 bit stuff isn’t used. Just like Pi1->Pi2.
Though if what @rohbotics says is right about all the images being armv6 + hard float, the armhf builds are not necessarily raspbian compatible either. Though the Pi 2 can run standard debian armhf binaries according to this: http://sjoerd.luon.net/posts/2015/02/debian-jessie-on-rpi2/
RPI3 is different so I hope that they will updated it.
Anyway it works with Ubuntu 14.04 in chroot on indigo.
We are planning on using an ARM A53 based solution for our products and RPI3 or DB410C are great platforms to use.
hopefully Kinetic will be supported on the RPI3 somehow
The RPi 3 CPU core was picked because it’s a great 32 bit processor (and happens to also work in 64bit mode). That said, the 1GB of RAM and the rate at which the hardware is being iterated, there has not been much movement in the Linux community to put effort into an arm64 build.
I understand the interesting in ROS on Raspbian. That said, we do have a workaround now that Ubuntu Xenial (with and without GUI) is available and supports the RPi3 hardware well.
It does leave limited options for RPi-like hardware which has focused on Raspbian Jessie as their prefered OS.
Just adding on, as you mentioned Xenial images, Here is a link to a bunch of Ubuntu 16.04 Pi2/3 images, offering a variety of desktop and non desktop variants.
Yes. I’ve responded to a couple ROS Answers posts, suggesting those images. I suggest we continue to them as the starting pion to most. It would reduce the frustration level for many.
While those images are not perfect for everyone, they are likely the best option for most users on RPi hardware.
Aside: the RPi3 w/ onboard wifi support is the basis for the LoCoRo (low cost robot) project.
So I’ve got my pi 3 running in 64 bit mode with Gentoo. I’m slowly updating ROS ebuilds to work on arm64, but have not done them all yet or tested ROS compilation on the architecture (because I don’t want to mess up my portage tree, as getting 64 bit mode was quite a hassle).
That said, I might attempt a 64 bit ROS Gentoo image, and could upload it for everyone if there is demand for it.
