Does anyone use anything other than Raspberry Pi OS for performance reasons?

1

Hi all,

I’ve been prototyping my project and it’s going really well, however on a clean Pi OS with some services removed and isolating my process to CPU3 as recommended occasionally the OS will do a thing and there’s a little jitter (everything is written in cpp). I have spent many an hour with Claude isolating processors, Pi OS settings to set affinity in startup config, but ultimately you can’t pin (or have them avoid) kernel processors so they will always do what they want, and even setting realtime CPU priority for the cpp application it still happens, even though it’s very slight.

I was wondering if anyone went with another OS due to this problem?

Thanks,

Ross

2

As per hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix main readme:

A lightweight, non-GUI, distribution such as DietPi is recommended. Raspbian Lite is a bit easier to get started with and is a good second choice.

I’ve been using DietPi with all my RPi’s no matter the project or RPi version since a friend recommended it to me and had no issues with the distro.

1 Like
3

Thanks b4rt0, I can’t believe I completely missed that in the library documentation! I’ll give it a try!

Ross

4

It is a pretty significant difference with my meager 3+ running the desktop browser emulator.

5

Yeah, and you can still install graphical interface of your choice using built-in dietpi-software automated installer if you have a different project that requires it (I wouldn’t recommend it for led panel project).

6

There is a recommended kernel now to reduce flicker.
Also some preinstalled images to just flash.

2 Likes
7

Wow this is perfect timing, I’m going to check this out, was following the thread also. I did try DietPi but this didn’t help, completely agreed this is a kernel issue as the kernel processes do whatever they like and nibble at the CPU enough to cause a very slight jitter, but it’s enough to undermine the quality of the display.

I’ll let you know how I get on but seriously thank you for your efforts on this, this stands to massively boost the quality of these projects, for me quality is essential, I’m really excited to try out the Kernel!

1 Like
8

Man, gotta say a massive THANK YOU for the effort you put into this (and to Marc for the testing), I was plagued by very gentle intermittent jittering which given I’m OCD was like daggers in my eyes. After porting those tars overwriting my kernel in-place they’re gone on my project completely (6x 64x64 panels, active board on PiZ2W, playing converted animated GIFs at 11 bits PWM).

9

Great news, glad that has solved the issue !!

1 Like
10

Dietpi will help, but if you really need perfect output, you’ll need/want an RT kernel:

1 Like
11

Hi cubinarium

I made a change to the kernel as RT was causing some side issues.
RT for me wasn’t the fix but other patches applied.

I would be grateful if you can comfirm the below optimized kernel version works to resolve your issue in the same way. It doesn’t have the RT feature but hopefully should still resolve the problems you had.