2.1.2. Three different ARM ports
The ARM architecture has evolved over time and modern ARM processors provide features which are not available in older models. Debian therefore provides three ARM ports to give the best support for a very wide range of different machines:
Debian/armel targets older 32-bit ARM processors without support for a hardware floating point unit (FPU),
Debian/armhf works only on newer 32-bit ARM processors which implement at least the ARMv7 architecture with version 3 of the ARM vector floating point specification (VFPv3). It makes use of the extended features and performance enhancements available on these models.
Debian/arm64 works on 64-bit ARM processors which implement at least the ARMv8 architecture.
To assure compatibility of their software across all RPi models, Raspbian calls all RPi models as armhf, the RPi1+Zero as ARMv6 (with special hard-float capability) and all other models as ARMv7.
So theoretically Debian ARMv8 works already for quite a long time on RPi, but we stick with Raspbian as DietPi basis, as it assures full compatibility, a wide user/support space and the benefit of ARMv8 is marginal, when loosing some special compilation settings + performance-related packages from Raspbian, possibly even negative.
RPi4 requires a new kernel tree (v7.1+) and bootloader files. So our current image does not work. Also, due to not further mentioned compatibility reasons, Raspbian for RPi4 is only offered as Buster version. Luckly we started early to make DietPi Buster compatible .
Note that this is still experimental. On the one hand, Raspbian Buster itself still lacks some features and requires some fine tuning, on the other hand DietPi "dev" code is present on this image, which is currently in Beta, so still might need some fine tuning as well .
I'll be playing with the Ri4, when it arrives in the next few days, as a replacement to my Xu4 which runs bittorrent/Plex.
My current plan is to install the Buster version of Raspbian then use the DietPi Prep_System script to convert. Would this be the best way yo go for now?
I have the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, 4GB version. If I install the experimental image, will I be kept on the experimental branch? What is the recommended way to install for me?