Balena Drops First Completely Usable 64-bit OS for Raspberry Pi 4

Richard Elliot

By Richard Elliot / News / 2nd October 2019

The Raspberry Pi 4 made waves with its upgraded hardware. Arriving as a massive hardware refresh, the Raspberry Pi 4 benefitted from a fresh system-on-a-chip (SoC), as well as more and faster RAM. Therefore, the Raspberry Pi 4, especially the 4GB unit, is increasingly capable as a basic desktop. Balena, the company behind software such as Etcher, a favorite in the Electromaker office for mounting images, has dropped the first 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4 operating system (OS), BalenaOS!

64-bit Raspberry Pi Operating System BalenaOS Released

BalenaOS for the Raspberry Pi 4 arrives with complete support for its up to 4GB of RAM. As such, you're able to run both 32-bit and 64-bit Docker containers on the Raspberry Pi 4. BalenaOS is based on Yocto, a Linux-based distribution (distro) engineered for running containers. Therefore, it's a super simple means of getting started with Docker on the Raspberry Pi. 

BalenaOS not only makes use of the Raspberry Pi 4's 4GB of RAM, but there's also GPU support for hardware video acceleration. Moreover, BalenaOS presents stable balenaEngine support for reliable activity even under unpredictable operations such as difficult networking or power. Additionally, there's a massive library of over 26,000 container images. 

For running containerized applications, BalenaOS simplifies the process of spinning up a virtualized environment. Coupled with increased Raspberry Pi 4 capabilities, BalenaOS truly unlocks the power of the Pi. It's a great means of creating a Raspberry Pi running Docker, and you can even create a cluster of Pi boards. 

What OS are you running on the Raspberry Pi 4? 

Photo of Richard Elliot

Residing on the south coast of England, Rich has spent the last few years building Electomaker.io from the ground up. He is usually found behind a laptop coordinating the rest of the EM team and occasionally finding time to contribute articles to the blog. When not tapping away at a laptop, he can be found either paddleboarding, at the beach, playing golf (badly), or camping with his family.

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