Fwd: Running Pure Debian on the Raspberry Pi 3B+?

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

Hi, people.

I tried to send the message below more than 12h ago, but it seems to
have been lost, so I am resending it via another relay.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Rogério.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>
Date: Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 6:59 AM
Subject: Running Pure Debian on the Raspberry Pi 3B+?
To: debian-arm@lists.debian.org


Dear people,

I am thinking of getting a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and, from what I read, it is
mostly supported by the upstream Linux kernel, but I still have doubts about
what I may be losing or not, compared to Raspbian.

>From what I read, there are some binary blobs needed for the video to work
(and I would like to use it with Kodi, to play some videos and to, perhaps,
act as a NAS or a place where I can use to save some files via NFS when a
USB HD is attached to it).

Regarding hardware support, are there many customizations in Raspbian that
are not in Debian?

Regarding video, are the players available in Debian (mpv, vlc, ffplay etc.)
able to take advantage of the hardware acceleration, if all the needed blobs
are in place?  I would be tracking the testing distribution (as I do with
all my other computers).

Also, when people talk about the performance of the raspberry pi and videos,
they always talk about the hardware decoding being used (which, I suppose,
is about H.264 video) and that gives no idea of how powerful the hardware is
(or is not).

To get an idea, what about the software encoding with NEON or whatever SIMD
that the is used with arm64? How are the numbers that one can get with, say,
the following command (with or without raspbian)?

    mplayer -nosound -vo null -benchmark -endpos 200
big_buck_bunny_480p_stereo.ogg

(The video available from:
http://download.blender.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/)

Thanks in advance for any help with understanding both running a pure Debian
distribution on the Raspberry Pi and understanding its performance (so that
I can compare with other hardware before I go on and buy one of these small
board computers).


Thanks once again,

--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br