Hey Guys,
Just wondering how things are going with the x64 build for the pi4 ? Is it safe to upgrade yet, or is it best to stay on the stable x32 build at present ??
Stay on the 32 bit build, unless you are testing it. Don't rely on it. Current nightlies are based off Ubuntu Server 20.10, and not all of the things have been worked out yet.
There's still no stable 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS distro to build off, until they get that out (which they have said is not a priority) the ubuntu build is preferred, but not everything has been adapted to work in ubuntu.
By all means give it a test (Index of /Distros/OctoPi/nightly-arm64) but as I said, no guarantee it will work.
Cheers for the info Charlie
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Yes even Marlin is currently only available in 32 Bit.
That's unrelated, 64 bit 3D printer control boards don't exist, and the software running on them is completely different. Raspberry Pi from the 3 and newer support 64 bit builds on the hardware, the RPi Foundation just don't have the software. 64 bit Marlin is not coming any time soon, if at all.
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2 of my printer boards are 64bit 
Ok, I didn't know that was a thing. TIL, I guess 
The pandapi board runs marlin and octorprint (or above rev2.8 also klipper) directly on the raspberry.
Only the temperatures are managed by a 32 bit soc.
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You can also run marlin on intel pc with IO-Warrior-56 boards and 1-2 Duex5 + Marlin.
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Running 32-bit programs on a 64-bit OS is standard practice. The 32-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS can use all 8GB of the RPi 4B when multiple processes are used. The only real advantage to a 64-bit OS version would be that one program could use all the memory.
Marlin (or Klipper) doesn't need the huge address space that a 64-bit program would provide. It has, after all, run quite nicely for a long time on 8-bit controller boards although Marlin V2 is beginning to stretch the available memory limits of the 8-bit controller boards.
Bottom line is that the 32-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS is more that sufficient to host OctoPrint (and Klipper). A memory size of 2GB is also sufficient so 4GB and 8GB only provide room for other programs which, more often than not, will have a negative effect on printing if run at the same time as a print.
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