Raspberry Pi OS 12 32bit correctly reports that is it Raspberry Pi OS 12 (PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)") and the Supported OS check identifies that, prints the warning and the instructions on how to proceed.
Raspberry Pi OS 12 64bit falsely reports that it is a supported OS (PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)") and gets past the Supported OS check and does not report the warning.
The reason that it is an unsupported OS is because our installation process handles Raspberry Pi OS as a special case to set up the networking stack. Version 12 completely changed how the networking is controlled and we have not updated the installer to account for this.
Everything should work just fine, and in most cases does work just fine. 64bit is 'heavier' so I suggested the 32bit option since you were so concerned about not using the resources and having a higher load average than what you previously had.
I still think we should be looking at why your interface is going non-responsive but I guess that's not why this ticket was opened.
Well, you're half right on that. The interface being unresponsive is a symptom, not the actual disease. It becomes unresponsive when it is under load, and I only know about this, because when it freezes it does not respond to DNS queries.
So when I try to go to a website, and it either takes a long time or says something with DNS, I know the Pi-hole froze.
You're talking about the static IP setting? Yeah, had a bit of a headache getting the device to have a static IP before even trying to install Pi-hole.
Anyway, how do we move from here? I want to help diagnose this, but I need redundancy, so let me know, and I'll try to set up the docker Pi-hole tomorrow.
I just got the USB case for my SATA m.2 drive, installed the 32bit on that, and have a few things to say:
The speed of everything is amazing compared to the SD card, even basic functions before I even installed Pi-hole. Everything is faster when doing it this way.
The reliability of USB SATA drive should be superior to and SD card, I wonder why it's not recommended anywhere on the guides.
I also expanded the ext4 partition to the entire drive size to avoid constant re-writes to the SSD, that is also something I think should be covered for new users. Most SD cards are larger than 2 GB nowadays, and when there's not enough space, the OS needs to do a lot of pruning and garbage collection. That in turn ends up in writes to the storage, which already has a short life span.
I installed bookworm 32bit, and still did not get any warning or needed any bypass like you suggested before. Maybe it is no longer relevant?
Those are my findings so far, I will give it a week to see if there are any downfalls to this setup.