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With the latest release from 2020-05-27 the operating system was renamed from Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS and its image names are changed from e.g. 2020-02-13-raspbian-buster.zip to 2020-05-27-raspios-buster-armhf.zip, with the postfix -armhf. This implies that there could also be a version with -arm64.

If this is true, where can I find, install and run this 64 bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS?

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  • I have 64-bit Raspberry OS running in front of me now, the download instructions are here. I've flashed a card as normal with no problems, save one package (Mathematica) will not as yet install.
    – Nick
    Commented Jun 2, 2020 at 8:52
  • Sounds more like using a pipeline that uses this convention.
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    Commented Jun 2, 2020 at 9:45

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You can find the image of the 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS at

You can download and flash it to a SD Card like any other image of the operating system. You should be able to run it on a RasPi that supports 64 bit. As far as I know, these are RPi 3B, 3B+, and 4B. There may be others, please give me a note.

But if you boot it, it hangs and just do nothing. This is because a Raspberry Pi loads a 32 bit kernel by default. You have to tell it to use the 64 bit kernel /boot/kernel8.img. This can be done with an entry in /boot/config.txt. Just mount the fat (boot) partition of the fresh flashed SD Card, attached to your "flashing machine", and add this line to it:

kernel=kernel8.img

and have fun with 64 bit :-)

Update:
The link to the forum thread Raspberry Pi OS (64 bit) beta test version, given by @Nick in his comment (thanks to Nick), says what it is. As you can read there, it has some limitations and it is not official propagated.

Known issues at 2020-06-02
1. There is no hardware video acceleration in VLC or Chromium
2. libraspberrypi0, libraspberrypi-dev and libraspberrypi-doc have been moved out of /opt/vc/* and into /usr/* instead (making it more standard). Any code built against these libraries will require changing to refer to a more standard location (/usr/lib/ rather than /opt/vc/lib)
3. Due to 2) Many packages that expect libGLESv2.so libEGL etc will require rebuilding.
4. raspberrypi-bootloader and raspberrypi-kernel contain useless non-64bit binaries and is missing the work done to minimise the delay between files being deleted and installed to /boot
5. There is no Wolfram Mathematica built for AArch64
6. Minecraft shim layer requires rebuilding to cope with 2)
7. VLC needs rebuild (not available)
8. VNC server not rebuilt yet for 64bit

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  • 2
    What advantages have you noticed with the 64-bit OS?
    – Seamus
    Commented Jun 2, 2020 at 7:43
  • The compute modules are also 64bit
    – Swedgin
    Commented Jun 2, 2020 at 8:23
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    @Seamus I can direct address more than 4GB without big numbers ;-) No, but it is a very popular request of many people, something like the must have a static ip address.
    – Ingo
    Commented Jun 2, 2020 at 9:23
  • @Swedgin Yes, the link will be obsolete in a couple of months like any other version, but I think it will be accessable like any other obsolete version.
    – Ingo
    Commented Jun 2, 2020 at 9:29
  • @Swedgin Done. Good idea, thanks.
    – Ingo
    Commented Jun 2, 2020 at 9:36

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