Igor

USB is back with kernel 4.6.2
 
Thank you

I'm glad to give something back to Armbian.

I don't see any downsides for having a maintained repository for H3 legacy kernel.
 
I can help with testing built-in wireless or anything device specific on different Orange H3 boards if it is needed.
 
Desktop part of Armbian is not actively maintained right now, so I guess anything that works is acceptable.

Thanks for at least some encouragement While you (tkaiser) are absolutely focused on headless systems, others might be on desktop/graphics. So at least for them this will be interesting for a while. I will join you with maintaining desktop version shortly. If I want to make Kodi working with libvdpau-sunxi, Armbian is much nicer platform to develop on and I can help you with squashing some bugs in the meantime. Currently I'm a bit short on time, but I will contribute for sure.

@Xer0
 
https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/blob/master/desktop.sh
 
We need implementation there, within build process. Current way is outdated, a bit dirty and need an upgrade. It looks like it's still working on H3 but failing on A20 since certain libs needs updated versions. We need a solution which is build from sources to get rid of outdated prepacked libs and pack output into .deb that we can provide an update. Only complete solution makes sense since we already have some temporally solution.
 
@madilabs
 
Check our way of packaging. It's fairly simple, no need for any extra tools.
https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/blob/master/extras/tools.sh#L33
 
Later tonight we will be selecting for the first batch - already moving tasks are having advantage.
 
add.
... and well designed and not yet working procedure is better than a quick fix.

I would be happy if the Beelink X2 was officially supported by Armbian!  I have two units of the Beelink X2 and will be glad to help out to the best of my abilities. I am a seasoned Unix/Network administrator but not experienced in software development.
 
I managed to start up the "lima-memtester 100M". It is now running and I will post my results in the other thread in about an hour or so.
A big Thank You to tkaiser and Igor for all your good work with Armbian!

I assume you rebooted the board. Huh. I need to check if there are some problems with our build config ... tomorrow. Currently out of office.

Clearfog PRO with R1 in the back
 
After a day of playing, I am running full featured Armbian, Debian Wheezy, built with Armbian script from sources. We had to fix few things in U-boot and upgraded kernel to .82 but generally it was easy to boot the board. Of course SolidRun also provide some basic images.
 
Three(3) phys, USB and PCI is detected in kernel 3.10.82 - I don't have much hardware to plug in so I can't do much tests at this point. There is no CPU governor (yet?), so I assume it's running full speed (1.6Ghz) all the time. There are dip switches on the board to set cpu / dram speed ...
____ _ __ / ___| | ___ __ _ _ __ / _| ___ __ _ | | | |/ _ \/ _` | '__| |_ / _ \ / _` | | |___| | __/ (_| | | | _| (_) | (_| | \____|_|\___|\__,_|_| |_| \___/ \__, | |___/ Welcome to ARMBIAN (Debian wheezy 3.10.94-marvell) Last login: Sat Jan 9 10:11:28 2016 from desktop Load: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05 - Board: 64.6°C - Memory: 973Mb root@armada:~# Waiting for:
I decided to drop idea to put an AC card into the board since it's simply too problematic and expensive (66USD). This card doesn't have support in legacy kernel, in 4.4 have no idea if everything else already works + I have only one AC device in the lab. The Wireless card I choose is not fresh new but it's cheap (14USD) and reported working on Linux: Atheros AR5BXB112 AR9380 450Mbps. If I get stability and around real 300Mbps is good enough.
 
M2 drive. I'll put one 128G INSSD128GM.26M2242 TRANSCEND MTS400 128GB SSD SATA3 M.2 2242 TS128GMTS400 which should be big enough for most cases.
 
Mpci2sata for one ordinary SATA. 
 
SFP module. Haven't found the proper one yet.
 
With Armbian tools it's possible to build (I collect and fix all patches) and should be possible to boot kernel 4.3.3 and 4.4 - next.
 
Network performance (over TP link switch). 
Windows desktop -> Clearfog [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.09 GBytes 938 Mbits/sec [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.07 GBytes 922 Mbits/sec [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.09 GBytes 938 Mbits/sec Clearfog -> Windows desktop [ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.04 GBytes 889 Mbits/sec [ 5] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.02 GBytes 878 Mbits/sec [ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.03 GBytes 882 Mbits/sec To be continued ...
 
Edit #1: Board boots with 4.3.3 / Eth: no, USB: yes, mPci: yes
Edit #2: Jessie image download
Edit #3: Legacy kernel upgraded to 3.10.94
Edit #4: Network performance
Edit #5: If eth0 connected to gigabit, + cca. 2°C more heat on CPU in idle
Edit #6: mSATA is working with patched U-boot
Edit #7: mSATA and mPCI can be enabled in any combination. Tested one wireless card ...
Edit #8: boot time when installed to low performance 32Gb mSATA, power -> Login prompt <= 10s, (-3s waiting at u-boot) = cca. 7sec
Edit #9: I2C working out of the box. Tested with display, communication is slow. Perhaps only the settings
Edit #10: USB somehow buggy on current legacy kernel. I was trying to use Temper to collect temperature ... it worked once, next reading hang the device and I need to unplug / plug. Haven't debug. USB flash memory working normal.
Edit #11: Added cpu freq scalling 800/1600Mhz -> less heat in idle
Edit #12: Kernel 4.3.3 & 4.4 / Eth: yes, USB: yes, mPci: yes, mSata: yes ... and doing preliminary testing with Atheros AR9380 N wireless card // Kernel not ready yet
Edit:#13: Added mSATA to SATA card, patch a driver to unlock cheap - (consumer grade!, 13 USD shipped) AR9380 AR5BXB112 wireless card to operate at 5Ghz. Running STABLE
Edit:#14: Booting from m2 120G SATA drive
Edit:#15: Measuring temperature on the edge of heatsink = 39-42 while ambient is around 20.
Edit:#16: Added external 2.5 inch mechanical SATA drive powered from Clearfog +5V from header

Well, this is bleeding edge kernel. Bugs are more than expected - hard to tell what is wrong without serious debugging. 
 
I know that instructions are not the best, but we are working on it all the time. I never thought that we must be more detailed in this - I assume people know how to handle some virtual machine and install Ubuntu Linux on their desktop machine. We give only most important information, but all aspects are surely not covered. Lately we even address community to help us on making better manuals since it's getting too much for a small crew. We even arrange one cool board as a reward.
 
Nevertheless things are working for your intention!

XU4, big heatsink, no fan
 
 
 
http://sprunge.us/DDVC

Rev 1.0 (resolution should be high enough to spot details): http://linux-sunxi.org/Banana_Pi_M2%2B#Pictures
 
And no, I won't spend any more time with Foxconn/SinoVoip products. They simply don't get it and we here at Armbian should also think about stopping to support all of their products except of the real Banana Pi [TM]. It's both an insanely waste of time and also a wrong signal to our users.
 
Just as a little example: 'Team BPi' produced for each and every BPi that came after the first A20 based fake videos showing features that didn't work (at that time), especially regarding 'GPU acceleration' and 'HW video acceleration'. When they came out with the H3 based M2+ where all this stuff already worked (since community did such a great job over at linux-sunxi and also in Orange Pi forums) they were still busy showing fake videos (nearly statical manga video stuff as proof that 'HW acceleration' would work) instead of using any of the advanced OS distros for H3 boards and demonstrating that it really works using appropriate software.
 
They simply don't get it, just look through their forums. But on the other hand they don't need to improve anything since they can sell all this incompatible crap under the Banana brand and therefore constantly new clueless people buy their products just to realize later that nothings works (as expected), then use these electronics as a paperweight and disappear from the forums since none of their questions got answered. Then the next bunch of fooled customers appears, complains, does not get their questions answered and the whole thing repeats again and again.  

As many of you know, lots of git repositories are automatically built every time there's a pull request, letting the project community know if that commit will introduce a flaw of some kind.  
 
If it's a help to Armbian, I'd like to configure a cloud-based build system that should be able to cut the "build all" time down to about 10% of what it is, and possibly to a number lower than that.  Here's what I'd do.  I'll use Google cloud's preemptible servers to spawn say 30 machines with the trigger being a pull request.  If any of these macines dies during the build, it'll come back red.  and otherwise, it will come back green and upload all of the binaries to google cloud storage.  It won't cost much and would be my way of tossing something into this awesome project.  I'd estimate this would take between a week and a month to set up, since I will have to figure out how to feed the jobs to the machines.  Despite this, it's highly doable and I've worked out a few different ways that it could be done. 
 
If you let me know that this would help, I'll begin on it this weekend and describe the way that I'm doing it.  If it doesn't help, please let me know that, and I'll try to come up with a new way of helping out.  

Most of tasks benefit from team work - you are welcome to join / claim already claimed tasks. If you need anything special, just ask.

Yep, done.
 
https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/commit/7c976ad5fbb0277c017fac2942cd949a3c6f387e
I hope this is less confusing.

USB wireless dongles for OPI ONE continue working in Armbian_5.13. The internal wifi 8189fs for OPI LITE with factory antenna works well in managed and AP mode in Armbian_5.13.
 
Performance tests with OPI LITE internal wifi show excellent results compared to USB dongles. Wireless connection is reliable and surprisingly performant ( 40 mbps crossing 2 walls in noisy environment, compared to 20mbps from notebook and 2 mbps from OPI ONE USB dongle ).
 
 
 

Wifi is fixed on all H3 boards. I will push new update later in the evening where 8189fs and 8189es are updated. I made brief testing and AP mode also works on both chips.

Hi all,

I have been reading through this thread and it makes me kind of sad...
 
This software called CedarX is known to violate the GPL. Please do not do any things with this but i ask everyone to work with http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus, the libre open source reverse engineered counterpart.
 
Based on Allwinner software? GPL?
 
Sure it won't work with the effort of a few hours because this is WIP software, hacked around developer boards. And it's not a matter of Armbian, because Armbian is just Debian and you can do everything you do can with Debian, too.
 
Good to know that you don't want to use this because iirc this is using Allwinner code, probably GPL violating. People always want quick solutions. And this is the main problem. They even don't care of using GPL violating software.
If interest in open source software -> http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus would be more present, we could have had a more mainlined kernel driver for the video engine already. And maybe Team-Kodi would have recognized this effort, too. But only talking about "CedarX", the GPL violating Allwinner code, slows that effort down dramatically.
 
With the right bits of software, it will for sure run on linux. There are just too few people working on a suitable, long-term, solution using open source software.
New Mali drivers are not needed.
What is the good reason, why Team-Kodi has no intention?
I advise everyone, that has the skills, to work on mosterta's solution, working with GPL violation software is not the right way.
There are still efforts to make Kodi available on Allwinner with open source software. This simply needs time. See mosterta's post as a personal memo. Though some bits are missing there, which can be found all over the net somewhere.

Regards
rellla

It is definitely possible to introduce parallel processing with a quad core. My thread on the Raspberry Pi forum discusses compiling new versions on gcc with support for the MIT/Intel Cilk parallel programming extensions on ARM devices. The compiler is tested with parallel algorithms for sorting, prime number sieves, fast Fourier transforms, computing fractal basins of attractions for complex Newton methods, numerical quadrature and approximating solutions to high-dimensional systems of ODEs.  
It is of practical interest how well the implementation of each algorithm scales on physical hardware. Due to constraints of shared memory and I/O very few algorithms scale linearly with the number of cores over a very large range. This leads to an engineering problem that may trade off algorithmic efficiency for parallel scalability to achieve fastest execution times on multi core CPUs.
 
With a quad core CPU the maximum theoretical scaling is four fold, while an eight fold increase is possible with an octo core. Modern compute nodes have 16 to 48 CPU cores and thousands of GPU cores. Thus, while it is possible to consider parallel optimization for a quad core, the problem is more interesting with eight cores.

Hi all, (first post...)
 
Sorry to harp again on the everlasting kodi requests, this time not regarding A20 but S905/Odroid C2 .
I own a banana pi (original) for some time now and came to run armbian headless on it after at some point it was clear, how things were going with A20 video drivers and hardware accelerated Kodi is not likely to happen on these devices. But with the AMLogic boards it seems to be a different story... 
So i got my C2 3 weeks ago, and (of course...) one of the first things i did was trying to run a media center on it. So the C2 ist only widely available for 3 months, and i wasn't expecting too much. And that was right! After going through all the available options in the hardkernel forums i find there is currently not much more than a couple of alpha-quality images for the C2. 
- The official hardkernel ubuntu image (even the last 2.0) is still quite buggy (unable to get a german keyboard on console, package broken... ts,ts), only a bloated desktop image available and only a half hearted kodi-build without working pvr-addons in it (so worthless to me)  
- The hardkernel provided Android is hardly working, has EDID-issues and is nothing more than a demo at the moment. kodi android doesn't work properly 
- Some guy XeoSal offered a C2 optimized - debian build called odrobian ( going the bananian way...). But that dates back to march, seems a one man show and seems half- or fully abandoned
- kodi/libreelec dev WRXtasy has made an experimental Libreelec build, that's not too bad, but has EDID issues as well and only runs at 720p on my rig.
So currently there's 4 "nearly there"-options, but nothing that's usable . Since i neither want android nor openelec/libreelec (b/c I need e.g. an nfs-server running)  it seems natural for me to turn to armbian, which already has a mature userland and anyway is the right approach by not inventing the wheel again and fighting the same bugs for every board over and over.  
 
... But i would need kodi running. (not necessarily a desktop), and i feel the effort to make it happen would be best invested in a project like armbian with an already relatively solid server base. I read that there are 3D accelerated x11 and framebuffer drivers available for the s905/mali for a couple of weeks, and are there a couple of kodi repos for c2/arm64 already available at github...
Do Igor or tkaiser have a general idea about how much work it would be and what needs to be done to produce kodi-packages for armbian (arm64/s905)? I've read that Igors point of interest is not so much multimedia, but maybe there are some other skilled people interested? I would be willing to do what i can (I'm not a professional dev, but operating linux iron for a living as administrator), if there's some guidance. 
 
-  

ok guys  
I did as you told me and follow the Igor post ....
I start my scanner on android phone and I see the wifi net , and also I'm able to connect it 
The info are ....
Access Point : MySystemWifi MAC Address : the MAC of the wlan0 Device : FN-LINK TECHNOLOGY LIMITED Safety : [WPA2-PSK COMP] [ESS] Channel : 5 (as in the hostapd.conf) Signal : -26 dBm ( not so bad for the moment) Connection time : 72 Mbps TCP/IP Informations MAC ADDRESS : ********** IP : 192.168.1.5 Netmask : 255.255.255.0 Gateway : 192.168.1.1 DNS 1 : 192.168.1.1 DNS 2 : 0.0.0.0 Server DHCP : 192.168.1.1 What to say guys , first of all  BIG THANKS TO ALL
The eth0 is connected and internet is running ,
Now I have to test the connections . Into the orange pi I will write a tcp server and in android or desktop I will write a client .
If the data exchange well I have resolved a lot of troubles .
ciao 
Walter

Since we're now dealing with a few more H3 devices and some vendors also provide OS images and users get confused a small note regarding kernel situation with H3 at the moment and also an update regarding performance relevant settings (by tweaking these intelligently H3 devices might run multiple times faster!).
  Mainline kernel:   The linux-sunxi guys are doing a great job writing all the stuff necessary from scratch and sending it upstream so that H3 and boards are more and more supported by the stock linux kernel available from kernel.org. For us at Armbian the missing Ethernet driver for H3 was the showstopper that prevented us releasing Armbian images with kernel 4.x so far.    In the meantime or since we had to realize how horribly some H3 boards might overheat (BPi M2+ is currently the worst example but it turned out that NanoPi M1 and Beelink X2 behave the same) missing THS support in mainline kernel is another important reason that prevents Armbian releases for H3 boards. We tried to run the boards downclocked to just 816 MHz just to realize recently that BPi M2+ with specific test workloads has to throttle down to 240 MHz (and needs to kill CPU cores so under worst case conditions we could drive the M2+ only with 2 cores at 240 MHz which is a really bad joke -- so we need throttling working with mainline kernel to release Armbian vanilla images to the public)   BSP kernel:   So while we're testing with mainine kernel stuff from time to time all we now have to release to endusers are some variants of Allwinner's Android kernel for H3 devices (called BSP kernel -- BSP is for 'board support package', that's an ugly tarball with an 3.4.39 kernel Allwinner throws at manufacturers who want to create H3 devices).   Allwinner's 1st BSP kernel variant:   Allwinner published 3.4.39 Android kernel sources last year here. All the official OS images for Orange Pis rely on this stuff (still version 3.4.39 and not even a fix for the rootmydevice security issue). This BSP variant also shows somewhat strange throttling settings (not throttling down while still running on all 4 CPU cores but killing CPU cores one after another without bringing them ever back without a reboot). So be prepared that you get horrible performance results with these settings (that explains the horribly low performance scores that are published on phoronix.com for various H3 based Orange Pi boards)   Loboris' kernel:   The aforementioned kernel sources are basically the stuff Boris Lovosevic (loboris) used to provide the first useable OS images for Orange Pis. He did a really great job fixing tons of issues (eg. enabling GBit Ethernet on OPi Plus or 1-Wire, camera support and so on). Unfortunately he was member of team overclocking so with his so called dvfs settings (dynamic voltage frequency scaling) the Oranges were overvolted (to be able to provide overclocking) and showed all sorts of strange symptoms (insanely high temperatures and stability issues). But this wasn't related to kernel functionality, just settings influencing power supply to the SoC/CPU and enabled overclocking.   Yann Dirrson's fork:   When we at Armbian started supporting H3 boards we relied on different kernel sources (ssvb, one member of the linux-sunxi community used Allwinner's original BSP sources, patched Mali support in to create a small OS image being able to test DRAM reliability. Another linux-sunxi guy forked this kernel tree and patched in a few more stuff (also some of loboris' great work) so we started using this fork as our basis.   1st Armbian legacy kernel:   Igor immediately started to patch the horribly outdated 3.4.39 kernel up to the most recent 3.4.y version (3.4.110 back then IIRC) and we threw in a bunch of other patches to improve this and that. Also as the result of still ongoing efforts to maximize performance/throttling settings Armbian shipped with totally different thermal settings which led in the end to pretty good performance of the boards (since we refrained from overvolting and developed sane settings)   Alwinner's 2nd BSP kernel variant:   When FriendlyARM announced their H3 based NanoPi M1 they also released a newer H3 user manual and also a new BSP kernel variant they obviously both got from Allwinner in the meantime. Jernej maintaining the unofficial H3 OpenELEC fork looked immediately through and spotted a lot of changes.    2nd Armbian legacy kernel:   So we (Armbian and jernej/OpenELEC) decided to switch to this newer BSP kernel, Igor cleaned up some stuff and again rebased all patches (up to 3.4.112 IIRC) to the new kernel sources and we adopted all other patches that were still relevant (we could drop a few). This way we could solve the ugly kswapd bug that plagued us before (one CPU core 100% active and eating up memory) and if I understood correctly also some HDMI/display area improved a lot.   Currently only Armbian and Jernej's unofficial OpenELEC fork use this kernel with all our many patches on top (maybe a few hundred security relevant and also a lot of functionality improvements): https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/tree/master/patch/kernel/sun8i-default(currently exactly 112 rather large patches that add support for various hardware, new features, many fixes)   The SinoVoip experience:   While all this happened Foxconn/SinoVoip released their BPi M2+ (a close clone of Orange Pi PC/Plus) and decided to rely on loboris' unmaintained and outdated 3.4.39 kernel for whatever reasons. Since BPi M2+ doesn't use the superiour voltage regulator used on the bigger Oranges at least no overvolting/overclocking is possible here. But for yet unknown reasons this board overheats terribly so we at Armbian adjusted our throttling settings very very low so be prepared that with official SinoVoip OS images strange things might happen when you put some load on this board.   Further improvements:   In the meantime we further improved thermal/performance behaviour and patched also the kernel so that when the board recovers from heavy overheating killed CPU cores are brought back when temperatures are normal again. In addition to that we provide way more cpufreq steps to allow finetuning throttling behaviour based on environmental conditions (as example: when you're running your device in a small enclosure more throttling will occur and you will benefit from more cpufreq steps in lower regions around 900-1000 MHz. If you go the other route and add a good heatsink and some airflow through a fan Armbian will provide you with a tool able to unlook higher cpufreq steps later this year on supported boards)   Summary:   Now a short overview about kernel situation combined with thermal/performance settings: Official Orange Pi images from Xunlong: 3.4.39, no rootmydevice fix, tons of security fixes missing, performance issues after medium load due to killed CPU cores Orange Pi images from loboris: 3.4.39, no rootmydevice fix, tons of security fixes missing, thermal/stability problems due to overvolting, missing sane cpufreq steps (not possible to use 1.3GHz for example) Official Banana Pi M2+ images from SinoVoip: 3.4.39, rootmydevice fixed, tons of security fixes missing, performance issues after higher load due to killed CPU cores Official NanoPi M1 images from FriendlyARM: 3.4.39, still no rootmydevice fix, tons of security fixes missing, unknown status regarding thermal/performance settings Armbian/OpenELEC: 3.4.112, rootmydevice fixed within hours (not an issue on OpenELEC), applied all available fixes from 3.4.y LTS release, constantly improving thermal settings (which means: performance)

worked  ,You guys are doing a great job by the way,  thank you.

TL;DR: All available H3 boards do not differ that much. But the few differences sometimes really matter!
 
The following is an attempt to compare the different available H3 SBC that are supported by Armbian. The majority of boards is made by Xunlong but in the meantime two more vendors started cloning the Xunlong boards (and also Olimex is preparing H3 boards as OSHW). Both Foxconn/SinoVoip with their Banana Pi M2+ and FriendlyARM with their NanoPi M1 tried really hard to copy everything as exact as possible (the so called pin mappings -- how the many contacts the used H3 SoC is providing are routed to the outside).
  All the boards share the same 40 pin GPIO header (trying to be compatible to the newer RPi boards) and since all the other pin mappings are also 99 percent identical you can for example boot a NanoPi M1 with an Armbian image for Orange Pi PC without loosing any functionality (except of camera module) and the same applies to BPi M2+ that will boot happily an Armbian image for Orange Pi Plus 2E (except of camera module and WiFi/BT)   In fact all the various H3 boards just differ in a few details:  Amount of DRAM No, Fast or GBit Ethernet Voltage regulator and 'thermal design' (responsible for performance in full load situations) Storage capabilities (pseudo SATA and eMMC or not) Count of available USB ports (with or w/o internal USB hub) Some additional features like camera modules, WiFi/BT and additional/optional connectors (here it's important to check for driver functionality/availability. If there's no driver providing the necessary functionality then these 'additional features' are pretty much useless -- camera connector for example) Why focussing on the H3 SoC for this comparison? Since some of these boards are priced pretty competitive Mainlining support for H3 SoC and these boards is progressing really nicely so we'll be able to run these boards with mainline kernel pretty soon (thanks to the great linux-sunxi community) 2D/3D/video HW acceleration is available with legacy kernels (again thanks to the great linux-sunxi community) The feature set is nice for many use cases (quad core SoC, GBit Ethernet and 4 useable USB ports on some boards make a really nice low cost/power server) It got somewhat confusing regarding the many available Oranges and now also the cloned Banana and NanoPi This is also in preparation of a broader overview of the capabilities of all the boards Armbian currently supports now focussing on the H3 family. So let's get into details:   Amount of DRAM   That's an easy one. The H3 SoC supports up to 2 GB DRAM. The available and announced boards use either 512MB, 1 GB or 2 GB DRAM (low-power DDR3L on the bigger Oranges and DDR3 on OPi One/Lite, BPi M2+ and NanoPi M1). In case you're using Armbian it simply depends on the use case. And also it's necessary to understand that Linux tries to use all your RAM for a reason: Since unused RAM is bad RAM. So don't be surprised that Armbian will eat up all your RAM to cache stuff which improves performance of some tasks but the kernel will immediately release it when other tasks have a demand for it. If still in doubt please enjoy http://www.linuxatemyram.com.   If you want to use your boards with the unofficial H3 OpenELEC fork too please be aware that OpenELEC benefits from at least 1 GB RAM since then the whole filesystem remains in memory and no accesses to a probably slow SD card happen. Prior to jernej/OpenELEC and Armbian resolving the kswapd bug a few weeks ago the 512 MB equipped boards performed rather poor. But now it seems that the unofficial OpenELEC fork runs pretty well also on the boards with less available RAM.   Whether 1 vs. 2 GB RAM make a difference absolutely depends on the use case and no general recommendations can be made.   Since OpenELEC has been mentioned it should be noted that the current implementation of the unofficial OpenELEC port for H3 boards makes use of the cedarx-license-issues-library (no clear license preventing the use if you care about legal issues -- please have a look at http://linux-sunxi.org/Kodi for further details)   Networking:   The H3 SoC contains an Ethernet implementation that is capable of 10/100 MBits/sec Ethernet and also GBit Ethernet. A PHY (that handles the physical interconnection stuff) for Fast Ethernet is already integrated into the H3 SoC but to be able to use GBit Ethernet an external GbE capable PHY is needed (the RTL8211E used on all boards adds approx 1.2$ to the costs of the board in question).   Most H3 boards use the internal Fast Ethernet PHY so wired networking maxes out at ~95 Mbits/sec. Orange Pi Plus, Plus 2, Plus 2E and BPi M2+ provide GBit Ethernet (+600 Mbits/sec with legacy and exactly 462 Mbits/sec with mainline kernel) while Orange Pi Lite saves an Ethernet jack at all. The good news: Even with the Lite you can use wired network adding a cheap RealTek USB3-Ethernet dongle like this which is confirmed to exceed 300 Mbits/sec in a single direction.   The currently available boards have either no WiFi (NanoPi M1, OPi 2 Mini, One and PC), rely on RealTek 8189ETV (OPi 2, Plus, Plus 2), the newer RealTek 8189FTV (OPi Plus 2E, Lite, PC Plus) or a WiFi/BT combination: AP6181 is used on the BPi M2+ but the vendor didn't manage to get BT working at the time of this writing. Currently only jernej's OpenELEC fork and Armbian have a working driver included for the new 8189FTV chip on the fresh Orange boards that seems to perform quite ok and provides client/AP/monitor mode. Can't say that much about that since in my very personal opinion all these 2.4GHz onboard WiFi solutions are simply crap   Voltage regulator and 'thermal design':   This is a very important differentation: All Orange Pi boards use a programmable voltage regulator to adjust the voltage the SoC is fed with. The SY8106A used on every Orange except of One and Lite can be controlled though I2C and adjusts the so called VDD_CPUX voltage in 20mV steps. This is important since 'dynamic voltage frequency scaling' relies on the principle of providing less voltage to the SoC/CPU when it clocks lower. So when the board is idle also the supplied voltage will be reduced resulting in less consumption and also less temperature.   Since H3 is somewhat prone to overheating being able to adjust VDD_CPUX is also important when we're talking about the opposite of being idle. The SY8106A equipped Oranges reduce very fine grained the core voltage when they start to throttle down in case overheating occurs under constant heavy load. As a direct result they will automagically perform better since reducing VDD_CPUX voltage also reduces temperature/consumption so both CPU and GPU cores in H3 due not have to throttle down that much.   Quite the opposite with BPi M2+. For whatever reasons SinoVoip saved put a the same programmable voltage regulator on their board as OPi One, Lite and NanoPi have but does not implement voltage switching so H3 there will always be fed with 1.3V. In addition it seems 'Team BPi' didn't take care of heat dissipation through PCB design (it seems Xunlong added a copper layer to the PCB that helps dramatically spreading the SoC's heat) and so with BPi M2+ (and NanoPi M1 too) you have to be prepared that you need both a heatsink and a fan to let this board perform under full load since otherwise heavy throttling occurs or when you use a kernel that does not implement throttling (4.6/4.7 right now for example) be prepared that H3 gets either destroyed or will crash through overheating if you run something heavy on BPi M2+ or NanoPi M1. We're still investigating whether this crappy thermal behaviour might be related to DRAM also (DDR3 vs. low power DDR3L on the Oranges) It seems this thermal behaviour is not that much related to the DRAM type used but more to PCB design (maybe using large internal ground/vcc planes optimizing heat dissipation on Oranges.   NanoPi M1 and Orange Pi One/Lite use a rather primitive GPIO driven voltage regulator that is able to just switch between 1.1V and 1.3V VDD_CPUX which already helps somewhat with throttling.   A rather demanding benchmark using cpuminer (a bitcoin miner making heavy use of NEON optimizations and assembler instructions) that knows a benchmark mode where it outputs the khash/s rate. On the left OPI+ 2E with the superiour SY8106A voltage regulator switching CPU frequency between 1200 and 1296 MHz. On the right little OPi Lite with the SY8113B voltage generator able to switch between 1.1V and 1.3V and with slightly lower performance since throttling prevents clocking that high. And in the middle as only board with applied heatsink on H3 poor Banana Pi M2+ using the same SY8113B voltage regulator but always feeding the H3 SoC with 1.3V (for whatever reasons!).      Storage capabilities:   The H3 SoC doesn't feature native SATA capabilities so the 2 boards that have a SATA connector (Orange Pi Plus and Plus 2) implement that using an onboard USB-to-SATA bridge. Unfortunately the chip used there -- a Genesys Logic GL830 -- is horribly slow limiting sequential transfer speeds to 15 MB/s write and 30 MB/s read. It also does not support the USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) so when using mainline kernel attached disks an especially SSDs couldn't show their full random I/O performance.   Given that common USB-to-SATA bridges used in external USB enclosures show way better sequential performance (35 MB/s in both directions and close to 40 MB/s when using an UASP capable bridge together with mainline kernel) the SATA port on these 2 SBC can not be considered a feature worth a buy.   Every H3 board has a TF card slot (Micro SD card) and some of the boards feature onboard eMMC storage. The H3 can cope with TF cards that are compliant to the SD, SDHC and SDXC standards so rather large cards with more than 64 GB capacity can also be used (be aware that there do not exist that much cards with a capacity larger than 128 GB. Chances are pretty high to get a counterfeit card especially when the price looks too good to be true ). You should also be aware that all H3 boards show the same sequential speed limitations (maxing out at ~23 MB/s) so choosing cards that are rated way faster aren't worth a buy. Better have a look at random I/O performance that is more important in most use cases.   The eMMC used on various boards is pretty fast (sequential speeds maxing out at ~75 MB/s and especially random IO way faster than the fastest tested SD cards which is important for desktop useage and databases for example) so you don't make a mistake choosing any of the eMMC equipped H3 boards (BPi M2+, Orange Pi Plus, Plus 2, Plus 2E or PC Plus). You find detailed test results of current SD/TF cards as well as all the eMMC variants used in these two threads: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/954-sd-card-performance/ http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/990-testers-wanted-sd-card-performance/ Count of available USB ports:   The H3 SoC features 3 USB2.0 host ports and one USB OTG port. With Armbian we configure the OTG port as a host port that shows pretty similar performance so on some H3 boards (Orange Pi PC, PC Plus and Plus 2E) you can benefit from 4 USB2 ports that do not have to share bandwidth.   Some other boards use an internal USB hub (Orange Pi 2, Plus, Plus 2) so the available USB ports have to share bandwidth in reality. Please keep that in mind when you compare the 4 USB Type A jacks OPi 2, Plus or Plus 2 feature (all being connected to a USB hub so having to share the bandwidth of a single USB 2.0 host port) with the 3 you can count on OPi PC, Plus 2E or NanoPi M1. On the latter boards you get full USB 2.0 bandwidth on each USB receptacle without the need to share bandwidth.   BPi M2+ does also not use an internal USB hub but only exposes 2 USB host ports on type A receptacles and the 3rd host port only without ESC protection via soldering (but since this board shows such a terrible thermal design and is relatively overpriced compared to other H3 boards that doesn't matter that much)   Additional features:   The only board featuring a Bluetooth capable chip from BroadCom is the BPi M2+. Currently the vendor admits that BT is not working so better don't count on this feature to be ever available.   Update: Jernej got BT already working in his OpenELEC fork so it's just a matter of time until it works with Armbian too.   The H3 SoC is able to output/intercept additional signals, eg. analog audio, Composite video (TV out), IrDA that are present on most of the boards. On the Orange Pi One many of those interfaces are only present as solder points (a bit too tiny to be used by the average maker) and on some other boards they are not present at all (BPi M2+ for example has neither composite video nor analog audio) so always check first what you need or want to use.   We have a nice sortable table in linux-sunxi wiki showing most of the important details: http://linux-sunxi.org/Table_of_Allwinner_based_boards   Camera modules:   Xunlong provides a pretty cheap 2MP camera module that should work with every H3 Orange Pi out there (they all have the necessary connector but for OPi One, Lite, PC and PC Plus you have to tell Xunlong that you also need a so called 'expansion board' that they ship free of charge if you add to your order that you need it. Starting with Armbian release 5.15 we also include an improved driver for this camera.   Regarding current state of available camera modules for Oranges, BPi M2+ and NanoPi M1 please look through this thread: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1213-ov5640-camera-with-orange-pi/?view=getlastpost

[Ended]   Be active, creative, helpful and you can get a powerful board in return. First give away batch is starting 11.6.2016  
It's not often that you can work on a software project that actually brings joy and helps people. Armbian is one of those project. It is a system that helps one build a kernel or boot images for several ARM development boards. 
 
It's in common interest that we improve level of support and to relieve most active people. Our crew needs an upgrade:
we need more coders, kernel hackers, UX designers to find and solve problems. If you are one of them, join our forum, join project at Github. we need properly built, packed and supported desktop with major functions: video acceleration/fbturbo, libump, mali, etc. we need to put together much better documentation. We need to fine tune MkDocs documentation tools For those who are willing to claim a task or help others to understand "how do I do this in Armbian" we prepared a dozen of boards as a small reward. It's a Xunlong Orange PI+ 2E, which design was improved based on requests from our community. It's H3 based quad core with 2G RAM, 16G eMMC, Gigabit LAN, WIFI and 3x USB.     There might be just enough boards for everyone who are willing to do some public service work. Claim your projects at this topic and each weekend we will discuss and select up to 15 people who will get the board, starting with 11.6., ... until we run out of boards. One will be notified by email and expect an answer within 48 hours, if not, board goes to somebody else.   Boards were donated and will be sent directly from Xunlong Co., Shenzhen, China.     1st batch is going to: Kriston, lanefu, vlad59, martinayotte, jeanrhum, Gravelrash, xcasex, naibmra, Xer0, madilabs, wha, @lex, WereCatf   naibmra - Bulgaria - kernel testing, try hooking to kernelci.org, docs - mid July wha - USA - 50unattended-upgrades, issue #337 - June Kriston - USA - documentation rework - July, August Xer0 - Germany - media build - July, August lanefu - USA - issue tracking improvements between forum and github - 22 June, July madilabs - Martinique - Packaging for desktop video acceleration - June xcasex - Sweden - desktop packaging - July, August jeanrhum - France - documentation and debian packaging - July martinayotte - Canada - maintain/fix DTS entries for some devices such I2C/SPI/W1 - ASAP vlad59 - France - Nanopi M1 testing and documentation Gravelrash - UK - Prepare HOWTO's & package "armbian-gc2035-fswebcam package" - June   2nd batch is going to: dimag0g, R2D2_C3PO, miked, 0x0, sysitos, jmcneill    dimag0g - France -  Packaging of OpenGL wrapper library - end of July R2D2_C3PO - Germany - Improved SD-Card partitioning - end of August miked - Canada - build system recension - end of August 0x0 - Russian Federation - Redesign site and documentation WIP + add some changes to graphics in distro. - end of July sysitos - Germany - replace/rework ramlog for systemd - end of August jmcneill - Canada - (Armbian is helping porting Freebsd)    Users were notified and were requested to provide: project name, due date and their shipping address

[Ended]   Be active, creative, helpful and you can get a powerful board in return. First give away batch is starting 11.6.2016  
It's not often that you can work on a software project that actually brings joy and helps people. Armbian is one of those project. It is a system that helps one build a kernel or boot images for several ARM development boards. 
 
It's in common interest that we improve level of support and to relieve most active people. Our crew needs an upgrade:
we need more coders, kernel hackers, UX designers to find and solve problems. If you are one of them, join our forum, join project at Github. we need properly built, packed and supported desktop with major functions: video acceleration/fbturbo, libump, mali, etc. we need to put together much better documentation. We need to fine tune MkDocs documentation tools For those who are willing to claim a task or help others to understand "how do I do this in Armbian" we prepared a dozen of boards as a small reward. It's a Xunlong Orange PI+ 2E, which design was improved based on requests from our community. It's H3 based quad core with 2G RAM, 16G eMMC, Gigabit LAN, WIFI and 3x USB.     There might be just enough boards for everyone who are willing to do some public service work. Claim your projects at this topic and each weekend we will discuss and select up to 15 people who will get the board, starting with 11.6., ... until we run out of boards. One will be notified by email and expect an answer within 48 hours, if not, board goes to somebody else.   Boards were donated and will be sent directly from Xunlong Co., Shenzhen, China.     1st batch is going to: Kriston, lanefu, vlad59, martinayotte, jeanrhum, Gravelrash, xcasex, naibmra, Xer0, madilabs, wha, @lex, WereCatf   naibmra - Bulgaria - kernel testing, try hooking to kernelci.org, docs - mid July wha - USA - 50unattended-upgrades, issue #337 - June Kriston - USA - documentation rework - July, August Xer0 - Germany - media build - July, August lanefu - USA - issue tracking improvements between forum and github - 22 June, July madilabs - Martinique - Packaging for desktop video acceleration - June xcasex - Sweden - desktop packaging - July, August jeanrhum - France - documentation and debian packaging - July martinayotte - Canada - maintain/fix DTS entries for some devices such I2C/SPI/W1 - ASAP vlad59 - France - Nanopi M1 testing and documentation Gravelrash - UK - Prepare HOWTO's & package "armbian-gc2035-fswebcam package" - June   2nd batch is going to: dimag0g, R2D2_C3PO, miked, 0x0, sysitos, jmcneill    dimag0g - France -  Packaging of OpenGL wrapper library - end of July R2D2_C3PO - Germany - Improved SD-Card partitioning - end of August miked - Canada - build system recension - end of August 0x0 - Russian Federation - Redesign site and documentation WIP + add some changes to graphics in distro. - end of July sysitos - Germany - replace/rework ramlog for systemd - end of August jmcneill - Canada - (Armbian is helping porting Freebsd)    Users were notified and were requested to provide: project name, due date and their shipping address