this can easily be answered with a quick web search or AI request for "disadvantage of LPAE on armhf". As expected, one of the drawbacks is increased use of memory when the benefit of larger addressable memory applies only to few installations and in a limited way.

OK, this is the line that is problematic. You need to find out why sda2 is mounted read-only. Go through the logs, for example "sudo grep sda2 /var/log/syslog". If you can, boot from a different medium and fsck sda2.

Certainly worth a look. It is also probably worth comparing the Armbian commit from when I last had it working until now, but it will need to be when I have a bit more time, and me remembering just when I first started seeing these issues.

I wonder if it'd be worth having a look instead at the Odroid stock kernel image and the vanilla kernel of the base same version; see what quirks are needed. I will have a look and see if that diff is less overwhelming than the massive gap you're seeing.

Hi pcduino2user, glad you are finding it useful. Maybe CMA Buffer size needs to be lowered during the kernel, which actually appears to get ignore anyway once the board has fully booted and replaced with 96mb based on the reserve memory node within the A10 DTSI. This is definitely needed if trying to run a desktop although I wouldn't recommend running a desktop on the Pcduino2. There are still some minor issues that I would like to address in future but I don't have as much time as I used to. For example the pcduino2 is actually booting from the Pcduino1 DTS although this problem is more cosmetic than functional. Both the Pcduino1 and Pcduino2 share the same uboot defconfig file but the Pcduino2 has a USB2 VBUS pin defined within its DTS and physically connected on the PCB. This is normally pulled high by a resistor so does not cause any problems with USB power being enabled. The build framework allows us to configure the kernel but there must be a way to customize uboot more dynamically as well? Now certain Armbian board configuration files appear to contain configuration data for adjusting the dram speed as can be found in the cubieboard.csc so I wonder if a similar setup in the pcduino2 configuration file to override the default device tree property to use sun4i-a10-pcduino2.dts instead of sun4i-pcduino.dts. Given the closeness of hardware it does not seem worth creating a separate defconfig file. Ryzer