At the CGPM , they decided the last leap second we'll ever see for UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, happened back at the end of 2016 .
Visit jeffgeerling.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2016 – Jul 2026
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I had to pause some of my work getting a current-gen AMD graphics card running on the Pi 5 and testing a 192-core AmpereOne server to quickly post on the M4's efficiency. I expected M4 to be better than M1/M2 (I haven't personally tested M3), and I hoped it would at least match the previous total-system-power…
December 2020 Update: Lo and behold, the Pi Foundation tacitly acknowledges the Pi needs a fan in the official case, because now they sell the Case Fan! The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 4 announcement blog post touted the Pi 4 as providing "PC-like level of performance for most users". The Foundation even offers a…
You can view a video related to this blog post here: Does UASP make the Raspberry Pi faster?. A couple weeks ago, I did some testing with my Raspberry Pi 4 and external USB SSD drives. I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested. In the comments on the video associated with that…
I've had a long history playing around with Raspberry Pis and other Single Board Computers (SBCs); from building a cluster of Raspberry Pis to run Drupal, to building a distributed home temperature monitoring system with Raspberry Pis, I've spent a good deal of time testing the limits of an SBC, and also finding ways…
When the Compute Module 4 was released (see my CM4 review here), I asked the Pi Foundation engineers when we might be able to boot off NVMe storage, since it was trivially easy to use with the exposed PCIe x1 lane on the CM4 IO Board. The initial response in October 2020 was "we'll see". Luckily, after more people…
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
Ever since the Pi 2 model B went to a 4-core processor, disk IO has often been the primary bottleneck for my Pi projects. You can use microSD cards, which aren't horrible, but... well, nevermind, they're pretty bad as a primary disk. Or you can plug in a USB 3.0 SSD and get decent speed, but you end up with a cabling…
Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of…
Back in 2015, I wrote a popular post comparing the performance of a number of microSD cards when used with the Raspberry Pi. In the intervening three years, the marketplace hasn't changed a ton, but there have been two new revisions to the Raspberry Pi (the model 3 B and just-released model 3 B+). In that article, I…
I always love when I find a really dumb solution that works reliably to fix a problem that should never really be a problem in the first place. But having worked with audio devices before—though nothing nearly as complex as the AirPods—I am willing to cut Apple some slack in building a seamless aural experience with…
tl;dr Raspberry Pi engineers tweaked SDRAM timings and other memory settings on the Pi, resulting in a 10-20% speed boost at the default 2.4 GHz clock. I of course had to test overclocking, which got me a 32% speedup at 3.2 GHz! Changes may roll out in a firmware update for all Pi 5 and Pi 4 users soon. My quest for…
In the past few weeks, I reviewed USB drive performance on the Raspberry Pi 4, and the importance of UASP support for USB drive performance. Both posts generated great discussion, and there were three things I wanted to cover in this follow-up, namely: Which drives support UASP Real-world performance benchmarks TRIM…
The MirkoPC is so far the closest thing to a full-fledged Raspberry Pi desktop computer: Based on the Compute Module 4, it has a full-size M.2 M-key slot, allowing the Pi to boot from reliable and fast NVMe SSD storage, a built-in headphone amp and line out, 4 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, two HDMI ports, and a…
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is smaller than a credit card, and I already have it gaming in 4K with an eGPU, running a Kubernetes cluster, and I even upgraded my NEC Commercial display from a CM4 to CM5, just swapping the Compute Modules! The Compute Module 4 was hard to get for years. It launched right after the…
The blog post Streaming services lost the plot detailed how streaming services have become the thing they were made to destroy. Like cable networks and satellite companies before, they're raising rates (at a rate higher than inflation), stuffing their content libraries with filler that's not even worth the bandwidth…
Update: See follow-up post about A1 vs A2 performance, Raspberry Pi microSD follow-up, SD Association fools me twice?. After I published my 2019 Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison, I received a lot of feedback about newer 'A2' Application Performance class microSD cards, and how they could produce even…
Last week Microsoft started selling their $599 Windows Dev Kit 2023, formerly known as 'Project Volterra'. I got my hands on one after a little bit of a shipping delay, and promptly started tearing it down to see what's inside. You can click here to browse the entire Twitter thread where I posted pictures of the box…
This is the fastest Arm desktop in the world, yes, even faster than the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. And today, I made it even faster. I upgraded everything: Faster RAM, 128 core CPU, 40 series GPU, I did it all, and we'll see how much we can obliterate the M2 Mac Pro. 128 cores—that's five times more cores, I'm also going to…
I partnered up with Mirek (of Mirkotronics / @Mirko_DIY on Twitter) to build the Pi4GPU (or 'PiG' for short): This journey started almost three years ago: almost immediately after the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was launched, I started testing graphics cards on it. First I tried some low-spec cards like the Zotac…
Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket! Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere's the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is…
From home temperature monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster hosting a live Drupal website, I have a lot of experience running Raspberry Pis. I've used every model through the years, and am currently using a mix of A+, 2 model B, and 4 model B Pis. The 3 model B+ was the first generation that had me concerned more about…
/ Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, \ \ prepare to die. (Klingon Proverb) / -------------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || || (Excerpt from Ansible for DevOps, chapter 12.) The fallout from this year's microSD card performance comparison has turned into quite a…
Earlier this year, I pitted the $549 ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 NAS against a homebrew $350 Raspberry Pi CM4 NAS, and came to the (rather obvious) conclusion that the Lockerstor was better in almost every regard. Well, ASUSTOR introduced a new lower-cost NAS, the $329 Drivestor 4 Pro (model AS3304T—pictured above), and sent…
Note: I also posted a separate review of some A2 'Application Performance' class cards, see this post: A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi. As a part-time tinkerer and full-time developer, I have been fascinated by single board computers (SBCs) since the first Raspberry Pi was…
tl;dr: The ODROID-C2 is a very solid competitor to the Raspberry Pi model 3 B, and is anywhere from 2-10x faster than the Pi 3, depending on the operation. The software and community support is nowhere near what you get with the Raspberry Pi, but it's the best I've seen of all the Raspberry Pi clones I've tried. The…
Earlier today I did a livestream on my YouTube channel to attempt using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. As with all my testing, I'm documenting everything I learn in this GitHub issue, which is part of the Raspberry Pi PCI Express Card Database website. It's only been a few hours, but…
System76 built their first workstation-class Arm PC, the Thelio Astra, and it's marketed for streamlined autonomous vehicle development. But I'm not an automotive developer, just someone who enjoys Linux, Arm, and computing. So I was excited to spend a few weeks (which turned into a few months) testing the latest…
Today Raspberry Pi Trading announced the Raspberry Pi 400, the latest in the series of small education-focused computers that started with the original Raspberry Pi in 2012. For years, people have come up with creative ways to hack a Pi into keyboards, like the Original Pi in an old Mitsumi keyboard, or the Pi 3 A+ in…
Since the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was introduced last year, I've been testing a variety of PCI Express NICs with it. One of the main types of NIC I'm interested in is cheap 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet adapters. 2.5 Gigabits is about the highest reasonable bandwidth you can get through the PCI Express Gen 2.0 x1 lane on…
After learning Apple killed off FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 Tahoe, I started looking at alternatives for old FireWire equipment like hard drives, DV cameras, and A/V gear. I own an old Canon GL1 camera, with a 'DV' port. I could plug that into an old Mac (like the dual G4 MDD above) with FireWire—or even…