How to: Change Raspberry Pi Firmware between 32bit & 64bjt

Terminal command to change Raspberry Pi Firmware to 64bit & 32bit

And you want to install all updates with:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Now to verify the 64-bit kernel exists:

ls /boot/kernel8.img

If it exists, it will simply print out the path to it. Otherwise, it will tell you: No such file or directory.

Switching

Now that we made sure we’re up to date and the 64-bit kernel exists, let’s switch to it!

Edit /boot/config.txt with your favorite editor, for example nano:

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Go to the very end of the file and add this line:

arm_64bit=1

Hit CTRL + X, confirm to save with Y, and hit enter twice.

Now reboot to boot with the new, 64-bit kernel!

sudo systemctl reboot

Verifying

Verify you are running the 64-bit kernel with:

uname -a

Which will output something like:

Linux raspberrypi 4.19.97-v8+ #1294 SMP PREEMPT Thu Jan 30 13:27:08 GMT 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux

As you can see, the kernel version now outputs “v8” at the end, and the architecture is now set to aarch64. This means we’re running the 64-bit kernel!

That’s all there is to it!

Known issues

• vcsm driver doesn’t work with 64-bit (only the cma version) which will break software decode with Kodi.
• Mathematica and Wolfram fail to run. Workaround here
• Java 8 doesn’t work but OpenJDK 11 does.