Part 60: OS upgrade made my Raspberry Pi 4 literally cooler

Raspberry Pi 4 with ice cubes on top of it. Image generated by DALL-E.

Ever since I started my What's up, home? project back in the spring of 2022, the Raspberry Pi 4 I bought back then has been running on Raspberry OS 11 -- or, a rebranded Debian 11 with a splash of love to make it perfect for these little credit-card sized computer marvels.

Today I took a brave step and upgraded my Raspberry Pi to Rasberry Pi OS 12, or again, to modified Debian 12. Even though Debian 12 has been out for some time now, Raspberry Pi OS 12 only came out late last year. 

Did it change anything?

Thanks to Zabbix, we can observe the possible changes closer. 

One immediate find is that my Raspberry Pi is now literally a cooler device than it was before. As far as I know, my little workhorse has all the same software up and running than before the upgrade, yet still I don't need to highlight the graph below to show you where Debian 12 booted up.

Temperature graph

Perhaps the newer kernel is smarter at throttling the CPU and other components, as CPU load and other factors have not changed much, other than memory usage where there is a clear drop. Why that happened only some time after the boot, I need to investigate more about that. It's also a possibility that I'm just about to humiliate myself by finding out later that something that usually runs, has crashed.

CPU usage

 

I/O request avg waiting timeMemory usage

 

 

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