NUMA NUMA make Raspberry Pi go ZOOMA

Raspberry Pi 5 gets 10-15% speedup with 100 line Linux kernel patch. And what if we could save 50 megawatt-hours of power annually, just with a software patch for older Pis?
I'll walk through the NUMA Emulation patch that supposedly boosts Pi 5 performance, as well as some other new performance-related developments coming down the pike!
Mentioned in this video:
- Pi 5 NUMA Emulation Patch: lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240625...
- What is NUMA? lse.sourceforge.net/numa/faq/
- x86 Fake Numa for CPUSets: www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.8/...
- Pi 1, 3 A+, 3 B+ S2Idle patch: lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/202...
- Raspberry Pi 5 A2 Command Queueing thread: forums.raspberrypi.com/viewto...
- My 2019 blog post on A2 microSD cards: www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/201...
- Pi 5 4GB model outperforming 8GB model: github.com/raspberrypi/firmwa...
- Overvolted Pi 5 from jonatron: jonatron.github.io/randomstuf...
- My video on M.2 NVMe on the Pi 5: • SBCs: It's time to dit...
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Contents:
00:00 - There's something off about Pi 5
01:27 - NUMA NUMA?
02:27 - The NUMA Emulation patch
04:29 - 50 MW of power savings (ish)
05:35 - microSD: A2 finally faster than A1
07:18 - Some Pis are slower than others
08:29 - Return of the Bloopers

[@alexlandherr]

I keep hearing some 20-ish year old pop song when reading “NUMA NUMA”…

[@Pc_User_Pro]

Name: Dragostea Din Tei

[@jonmarler]

Not gonna lie ... I am just the tiniest bit disappointed that we didn't get a tiny little clip of Jeff re-enacting that viral video clip here somewhere ... ;)

[@DoctorX17]

God, has it been that long…

[@vel0city96]

MAYA HEEEE, MAYA HOOOO

[@roostertechchan]

I had to pause Jeff and find the song :)

[@YouCanHasAccount]

Wholeheartedly agree with the kernel maintainer. This should be fixed in the firmware and not with some fake NUMA hack that adds eternal technical debt.

[@guiorgy]

Valid point, but the author also pointed out that the feature already exist for x86_64, so he was just extending it to ARM. Seems a bit unfair to not treat them equally. Then again, it could be argued that the x86 part shouldn't have been there to begin with 🤷‍♂️

[@s-x5373]

@@guiorgy it exists on x86 for allowing experimenting and virtual machine hacks I believe here it is discussed as a performance patch, it should not be used like that

[@bepamungkas]

​@guiorgy, that's not what the cited commit do. Said commit define arch specific code (under arm64) and promote them to generic since RISC-V also behaves similarly. I.e one code apply to multiple arch, so it make sense to promote them to generic. The newly introduced patch add new behavior either specific to ARM or Pi (the numa_emulation.* files). But the way it implemented, by directly patching base driver, carry the new behavior to base. So there are now 2 codes, one for generic, and one for Pi, both resides in base. IMO, it will be unfair to moved it into base driver (rahter than make it arch specific or move it outside the kernel) since base have dedicated maintainers that may or may not have the capability to verify the changes.

[@dennispadiernos]

My favorite blooper was "Raspberry Cake"

[@kevinroosa1315]

It's a slightly wider Raspberry Pi.

[@Suidloc]

petition to have these epic oldschool thumbnails from now on.

[@marcoroose9973]

NUMA NUMA

[@Count_Smackula]

The outtakes make me laugh. Glad I'm not the only one who trips over their words.

[@sevendaysin8374]

Please keep the outtakes! Funniest way to end every video =)

[@markarca6360]

@@sevendaysin8374 Reminds me of Technology Connections 💡💡💡💡

[@Sam-qn4ly]

lol, love the thumbnail. the video should have been uploaded in 240p to really fit the vibe :)

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh, and maybe sung throughout!

[@blackhole7818]

If You didn't know, your channel had been categorised as a server channel by KZbin. Now everytime I watch your videos I get recommendations for home server videos. Alongside yours.

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh, KZbin I don't think knows how to categorize things as well as it used to. I watched a video on antenna SWR measurement and now half my feed is ham radio stuff!!!

[@markarca6360]

NUMA stands for Non-Uniform Memory Architecture. This was already used in supercomputers.

[@YourWaterDispenser]

NUH UH its a parody name form the hit song Dragostea Din Tei

[@Brahvim]

_Huh._ I think I was taught that the "A" stood for "Access".

[@allenswackhamer5450]

Its not new at all. All multi CPU machines have it, so basically any server that is running in a DC right now. numatop etc... are old tools

[@wileamyp]

NUMA is particularly important for compute nodes with multiple CPU sockets or multiple GPUs.

[@JsemPO12]

I know this is totally irrelevant but yesterday I ate the best orange ever

[@joonasfi]

Congrats! How did it feel coming out?

[@jasonwnc]

Thank you Jeff for bringing back the bloopers! Such a pleasure to watch your videos. I’m sure they are, but I hope the Raspberry Pi Foundation is watching.

[@SumGuyzClone]

In one of these bloopers, you need to just roll with it and “skat” to a fake beat. XD

[@frankbohnen2347]

Every Sunday, I look forward to your videos. Always so informative. Please, more bloopers at the end. It makes it even more joyful to watch and shows how much effort goes into making these videos. THX for creating all this contends.

[@Neilhuny]

Absolutely fantastic video! Surely no-one else packs so much information in to such a small footprint. There is a week's worth of testing, playing, checking, reading and (mainly) head scratching in this video. Most of your videos, tbf

[@syrus3k]

Sleep states can be super useful if you're doing battery powered Pi stuff!

[@foldionepapyrus3441]

At the reported power saving not really, its such a tiny change to an already pretty small idle draw. If they can push it further then it would be great, but right now you get more benefit than reported here just dropping the minimum clock speed, and under volting type fiddling, at least on the Pi's I've played with - more power saving is nice though.

[@syrus3k]

@@foldionepapyrus3441 I have personally only played with the sleep stuff on the Pico which is obviously very different but interesting nonetheless

[@michaelreed9048]

Happy to see the bloopers back :) Thanks for the continued great content!

[@l0pher]

Thanks for the blooper reel again. Love it

[@anneallison6402]

Jeff I began watching your videos just before the pandemic and I can tell you after all this years I finally understand everything you say. You are gold!

[@greentravels2850]

"NUMA NUMA" 👍 Interesting look into some issues, I'll have to remember these as they get fleshed out.

[@mattybbg6850]

A doff of the cap to you and your 100% accurate shirt sir!

[@Rushil69420]

Loving the thumbnail shuffle. You screaming up at the Pi is easily my favorite one lol

[@optical_ideas]

Kinda interesting. And outtakes are always great 😄 i wouldn't mind if you include them every video

[@Kitteh.B]

Thumbnail and outtakes made this a fun video. Thanks for the smiles 💜

[@Ancipital_]

Your content just keeps getting better and better.

[@nickjohnson410]

Awesome video title. Made me chuckle. Thank you!

[@aquilafasciata5781]

My Pi 2 has been running 24/7 for the past 4 years as a PiHole server

[@haydenc2742]

Awesome, tweaking the system to make it run faster...always a bonus! Oh man...saving power globally Jeff...gives new meaning of "hack the planet" I really miss the blooper rolls from your video's! Keep em coming!!!!

[@gregspeakman9337]

Great vid Jeff. It makes sense of the core speeds.

[@RootiferasRetroGameplay]

Ah I'm looking forward to seeing Pi5 overvolt video. There will be smoke!

[@JeffGeerling]

Well... hopefully not, but maybe!

[@zambonidriver42]

Outtakes! Woohoo! Cracked me up.

[@Sierra-Whisky]

The concept of NUMA deserves so much more attention. Some types of workloads can benefit so much from understanding NUMA and using it right. On the other hand NUMA can cause serious performance degradation when done wrong.

[@StormWarningMom]

Bloopers at the end giving Technology connections vibes (which are awesome btw)

[@thomasrolfe8438]

lol that’s the best thumbnail I’ve seen in years

[@mikekopack6441]

LOVE the bloopers at the end !!!!

[@willboswell_]

jeff, i appreciate everything you do. ive learned more shit about computers from your channel than from any friend, teacher, or youtuber

[@reggiep75]

Glad to see that I'm not the only one looked up that song and the meme mime video too.

[@hoyschelsilversteinberg4521]

Your bloopers are so good lol.

[@davidpower3102]

The thumbnail is brilliant.

[@zeljkanenad]

Very insightful! Thank you

[@iestynd100]

being this early is proof im chronically online

[@Josstrigaming]

I feel this

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

Hit the bell icon to be early every time. Solidify your chronically onlineness.

[@djvincon]

Same

[@SpaceDoodle2008]

Very descriptive title!

[@heighRick]

Thanks Jeff, helps a lot!

[@mjmeans7983]

Now that the company has changed, maybe the reason is actually something like this: How do we keep the price from tanking when we have limited production capacity? Fan boys will pay for early access, others will wait. A few months later release improvements to keep it in the news and increase interest to avoid sales drops. If production bottlenecks are eliminated, release all the remaining planned (but secret until then) 'improvements'.

[@levieux1137]

My own experience has also been that it's mostly memory accesses that make RPis dog slow. Just try to build anything using "make -j $(nproc)" on it and compare with any other board. It's systematically twice as slow as other boards with comparable CPUs running at same frequency, unless you're running single-core. The worst of it is actually that their DRAM random access times are quite good, but that doesn't suffice.

[@AB-Prince]

shoutout to the generation that remembers dragostea din tei.

[@Rottinator95]

Love the outtakes 😂

[@cognisent_]

My god, the bloopers are back, hooray! 🎉

[@allenellisdewitt]

Numa Numa indeed

[@Fataha22]

8:21 I love they just flat out calling out Jeff for the title 🤣

[@sysadmin-info]

The end is the best. It happens to me very often. :)

[@jakobfindlay4136]

I saw both thumbnails this one is much better

[@foobar6846]

NUMA is super important when you deal with multiple sockets (and chiplets) and things like PCIe passthrough in virtual machines. It's bad enough, performance wise, to have to cross between NUMA cores on the same socket, it's brutal when you do it across sockets. Increased latency, limited bandwidth, you name it. I think I agree with the kernel developer, this is something the firmware should deal with, not something you should emulate in the kernel.

[@foldionepapyrus3441]

The idle power state is pretty cool, though when you are talking less than 3W draw anyway without it and the saving is so small it hardly matters for most Pi users. Though it is always nice to see more support for low power states it really matters so much more when the system actually has meaningful power draw when idle but not in a low power state. Being able to shed 20 or maybe even over 200 watts on a system with much more and higher power hardware is when the low power states really shine.

[@JeffGeerling]

Definitely; I would love to get better idle support (and have software that isn't constantly pinging the Internet (and using CPU cycles) on my AMD workstation... 60W idle!

[@supaschwamal]

Love your Dalek poster. I've got it too!

[@HurricaneRainbowOG]

your outtakes were funny :)

[@PhillipRhodes]

NUMA NUMA. Also, "nanu, nanu!" 😛

[@JamesJones-zt2yx]

Numa Numa...and now I need to go listen to a certain song.

[@ilovefunnyamv2nd]

I'm sure Jeff is trying to tell us something important, but I can think is: Vrei sa pleci dar nu ma nu ma iei Nu ma nu ma iei, nu ma nu ma nu ma iei

[@terrorpup]

LOL, I like Jeff how you are trying to hide the camera remote behind the Coffee Mug. That's good to know, thanks for the video. I got my first Raspberry Pi 5 8 Gig a couple of months ago. I kinda one those anger community users, that wasn't happy, well you know. So I figure I give it a tire to see if it's any better, plus I want to update the hardware for my gitlab, that currently still running on RPi 4 x 4. I going to get the Argon V3 and switch from SD to NVMe. Thanks for your videos.

[@JeffGeerling]

Now you know my teleprompter secret!

[@var67]

Geerling: Dutch last name. Brolsma: Dutch last name. KOINKIDINK?!?! I think not.

[@RaduRadonys]

Who is Brolsma?

[@var67]

@@RaduRadonys Gary Brolsma, internet legend who sang Numa Numa on his webcam.

[@RaduRadonys]

@@var67 Thanks, I've never heard of him until now :)

[@var67]

@@RaduRadonys No shame in that, it's TWENTY years old now.

[@WillVowels]

Pi-a-hee! Pi-a-hoo! Pi-a-ha! Pi-a-haha!

[@RalphHightower]

"Intriguing." -- Spock That's interesting and if the code boost makes it to ROM or the kernel. PS: And thank you for not playing that forgettable "Numa Numa" song by that Radar O'Reilly lookalike, otherwise, I would have to Rick-Roll you.

[@i_Kruti]

We need more Behind The Scenes........!!!!

[@maneeshs3876]

Nice video, now it's clear how much Raspberry Pi software is lagging in hardware optimization.

[@punkdigerati]

Each new upgrade felt like an ad segue

[@chimichanga5964]

that thumbnail killed me

[@JeffGeerling]

F

[@notsonominal]

_Without recompiling the kernel_ ... but then we don't have a reason to put on a fresh t-shirt?!

[@pablopoo]

Sometimes you won't compile release versions with all compiler optimization options turned on, or add some features, for stability reasons, but will be cool to have a distro with all bells and whistles turned on, just for fun :)

[@JeffGeerling]

Raspberry Pi OC OS

[@iXen000]

NUMA NUMA

[@benmorris9925]

Would you be able to a video comparison between the on-board audio jack on a raspberry pi 4 vs a USB audio card? I think there is an interesting history there between board versions. Love your content dude 🎉

[@scaredyfish]

Pet peeve: you can’t multiply Watts like that. 1 Watt for a year is still 1 Watt, because it’s a unit of energy over time. The unit of energy is Watt hours.

[@JeffGeerling]

Should've been 50 MWh (the h is so important there)

[@Brickkzz]

DRAGOSTEA DIN TEI!

[@karstentopp]

You just earned one more subscriber.....

[@wolbart]

Great ending! :)

[@JeffGeerling]

I don't always do bloopers, but sometimes I do :D

[@kevinwhite9919]

idle would be great, as long as any cec trigger can take it out of idle.

[@lasersimonjohnson]

We NEED Pi hibernation modes.

[@KG4JYS]

lol! I remember using MicroSD cards on orange and raspberry pies. Glad those are a thing of the past.

[@jeremybarber2837]

Numa numa!

[@selbie]

Bold of you to summon the ancient lore. I would downvote but I'm stunlocked with +10 Emotional Damage from finding out Numa has reached the 20 year mark.

[@JeffGeerling]

Half a lifetime ago... :O

[@aarocka11]

Numa Numa Yay!!!!!

[@gipilot1]

NUMA NUMA! *Quick Dance Break* I would love to see, if these patches would affect the non-pi SBCs with the same performance and power efficiency improvements.

[@JohnSmithYoutube]

Ooh first! I've been into Rasperry Pi for a while but the only NUMA I've ever heard of isn't computing related 😂 Love your videos, Jeff

[@trmazi]

NUMA NUMA!

[@iam.jasonhoward]

💯

[@coolergappney1943]

The numa numa guy recently re- made his video from way back

[@ZupaMolo]

AHA GREAT BLOOPERS

[@untoldtitan]

Numa Numa ftw

[@caspianmaclean8122]

Idle power saving could help battery life on pi-based handheld consoles.

[@SP-ny1fk]

Numa numa eh numa numa numa eh

[@owenness6146]

Numa Numa

[@timvanrooyen]

oh there’s a mouse behind the cup

[@mikk150]

Numa Numa yei

[@alexanderwingeskog758]

Wow the sleep state thing, just bought another Pi Zero 2 W that I have connected to a small battery (7.2 AH) and 30W smallish solar panel (with charger) to see if it (I don't have that much sun where I live) could "run" forever :-) and that would be awesome with even less power if not doing much work... But then again, I was thinking of making do something that will probably not let it into any kind of power saving mode anyway...

[@JeffGeerling]

Yeah a lot of times the sleep states are less useful for use cases where you would use a Pi-but still nice to have available nonetheless. I've started using Picos in some places where I used to use Pis, and even there, I think it would be nice to have better 'sleep'/idle support.

[@michaelweichhardt]

Giga Flaps

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

Numa Numa? Is this the advent of Dragostea Din Geerling?

[@Daily_Bugler]

Haha you viewed The Register website… Thats Jiffy on a watch list…

[@AmeOFF]

lol the thumbnail

[@Ironic-Social-Phobia]

The outro needs the TC background music...

[@JeffGeerling]

Haha, I always hear it in my head while I'm editing that bit.

[@miarosa]

"numa numa" as asked in the video

[@KernelFault]

A red light next to your camera that turns on with the HVAC might be helpful.

[@JeffGeerling]

I actually have most of it in Home Assistant, I just haven't had the time to wire up an automation for 'recording' that works for me. I can't just trigger it on the studio lights because sometimes I have those on when I'm not recording a video. And I'm still working on better automation for my recording / saving video files off the camera.

[@michaelcummings7246]

​@@JeffGeerlinganother thing to keep in mind is at least 90% of your viewers are in rooms with fans etc or other places with more than 40dB background noise and wouldn't even notice it as much as you do during editing 😉

[@JeffGeerling]

@@michaelcummings7246 Heh, true-but the rumble is annoying because of the frequency, and my HVAC unit also seems to not play nice with AI noise removal, making for some weird audio if I try removing it in post. Easier to just not have it going!