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NUMA Emulation speeds up Pi 5 (and other improvements)
Recently an Igalia engineer posted a NUMA Emulation patch for the Pi 5 to the Linux Kernel mailing list. He said it could improve performance of Geekbench 6 scores up to 6% for single-core, and 18% for multicore.
My testing didn't quite match those numbers, but I did see a significant and consistent performance increase across both Geekbench 6:
And High Performance Linpack:
…If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine.
But as you can see around 7/7 on that graph, the 100 Mbps went down to about eight, and that's the point where my wife starts noticing how slow the Internet is. Action level.
…Installing Ansible on a RISC-V computer
Ansible runs on Python, and Python runs on... well pretty much everything. Including newer RISC-V machines.
But Ansible has a lot of dependencies, and some of these dependencies have caused frustration from time to time on x86 and Arm (so having issues with a dependency is just a way of life when you enter dependency hell)... but in this case, for the past few months, I've never had luck installing Ansible from PyPI (Python's Package Index) on any RISC-V system, using pip install ansible.
Testing new Raspberry Pi 5 Cases - $7 to $79
Since the Pi 5's launch, a number of Pi case redesigns have launched, and there are a few new entrants with something to offer. Like Fractal's 'Baby North'... which, unfortunately, is only a prototype designed for their displays at Computex, and is not being planned for sale. At least not for now! I'll write more about this case later in this post.
The Pi 5's thermals are close enough to the Pi 4 that old cooling solutions work okay, but the port layout and inclusion of a power button means at least minimal redesigns are necessary.
…Remote shell to a Raspberry Pi at 39,000 ft
For a few weeks I've been beta testing remote shell, the latest addition to Raspberry Pi Connect. Just a couple hours ago I was on a flight home from the new Micro Center in Charlotte.
One huge problem with VNC or remote desktop is how flaky it is if you have limited bandwidth or an unstable connection, like on an airplane.
It takes forever to start a screen sharing session, and the airplane's flaky WiFi usually causes the session to lock up, meaning you can't do much at all.
…Giving away 480 Raspberry Pis was harder than I expected
I gave away 480 Raspberry Pi Picos at Open Sauce last weekend, and ran into a number of challenges doing so. All of them self-inflicted, of course. I didn't want to just hand them out like candy—or, well... that's exactly what I did:
My initial plan was to build a backpack mount for a full 480-Pico reel (they sell them in bulk like that, for pick-n-place machines). However, there was a major flaw with that design.
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