Live on 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4 with Gentoo

I recently [wrote](raspberry-pi-4.html) that the site is now hosted from the
raspberry pi 4.

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That was running Raspbian OS, a 32-bit debian derivative. For a long time I've
preferred Gentoo as a Linux distribution, but until now, all versions of the Pi
were limited in RAM, with the upper limit being 1 Gb.

While 1 Gb of RAM is entirely sufficient for running a headless home server, you
can quickly run out of RAM when you compile software with 4 cores
(`MAKEOPTS=-j4` in Gentoo's make.conf)

Now that a 4 Gb model of the Pi exists, I felt I could switch to Gentoo as my
primary Pi OS without compromise. Initially I planned to buy the 1 Gb model and
then a little later grab the 4 Gb model.

Ironically, I couldn't wait for the 4 Gb model to try 64-bit Gentoo and while
the `-j4` option does induce significant swapping and causes the OS to become
unresponsive, I have found that `-j1` is probably a better option anyway so that
the site can continue to be served during upgrades.

A final note and side-effect of switching to Gentoo on arm64, my
[overlay](https://github.com/zigford/gentoo-zigford) is slowly being updated to
support arm64 and as such, PowerShell is the first to be updated

![powershell on arm64](images/gentoo64bit.jpg)

Tags: gentoo, raspberry-pi, linux