The Raspberry Pi OS, previously called Raspbian, is a Linux-based operating system used for the Raspberry Pi single board computer (SBC).
The RPi OS is available in a 32 bit version and as a 64 bit OS, the latter available in beta as both a standard and "lite" version since mid 2020:
- https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/
- https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_lite_arm64/images/
The latest as of this writing is from 5 March of this year. It's not been officially released but it seems to work fine, though most people won't notice any performance increase it is necessary for the Pi 4 8GB to be able to access the full complement of its memory.
Running a Raspberry Pi from an SSD#
Two things to note:
1. How to obtain ID of a drive:
% sudo blkid /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: LABEL="S" UUID="f904c9c3-c970-4d74-b296-2b30720dc25b" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="f28fb834-01"
2. how to rsync between partitions, e.g.,
% sudo rsync -axv /mnt/sdrootfs/* /mnt/usbdrive
See: Move the Raspberry PI root file system to a USB drive