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sfx2000

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  1. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from lanefu in Placemaker - H5 crashing under SMP load   
    In any event, the clock diffs from "stable" to "unstable" - performance overall isn't enough to justify the risks, unless one looks at specific benchmarks...
     
    I'm not into benchmarking - I've got an interest in operational usage of the device.
     
    just my thoughts...
     
    sfx
  2. Like
    sfx2000 reacted to lanefu in Placemaker - H5 crashing under SMP load   
    Well.... that seemed to take it down pretty quick

     
  3. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from 5kft in Placemaker - H5 crashing under SMP load   
    Sounds good - and folks should test around the 504MHz DDR clock, along with the overlay to upclock on boards that support the 1.3V regulator... both at 1.2 and 1.3 GHz.
  4. Like
    sfx2000 reacted to 5kft in Placemaker - H5 crashing under SMP load   
    OK well that answers that...  I think it's clear that the memory tests used back in 2017 weren't sufficient to determine the stability of this clock.  Why don't I go ahead and set it to 504MHz as that's the FA default, then if desired people could look at overclocking this further.
  5. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from 5kft in Placemaker - H5 crashing under SMP load   
    ok - so the stock FA image also crashes on the same test - it behaves differently than the Armbian image, as it kills off the threads when it tries to do a privileged memory access...
     
    since we're working with armv8-a, we have kernel space (EL1) and user space (EL0) - hence the data abort, as the memory is marked as EL1, and an EL0 task cannot access that. I think that overclocking the CPU exposes a bug that is latent, even without the overlay, and this goes not to device tree, but to uboot and DDR ram init vectors there.
     
    The stress test (openssl) can show the bug, but this isn't the real problem, and the overlay just enables it to happen faster - getting board temp to around 60c, which on a small board like this, includes not only the SoC, but the DDR, can accelerate this issue, as some DDR can get a bit unstable at that temp.
     
    I don't have much time right now to debug further, as I'm in the middle of sfx's North America Tour - last week Austin, TX, next week Miami, FL, Atlanta, GA, Denver, CO, and a short trip to Salt Lake City, UT - about a week of downtime in the SAN, then back to Austin for a week.
     
    @5kft  -- Gnarly problem to sort, eh? But spending time might help other AW H5 targets...
     
    @Igor -- something to watch maybe
  6. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from Igor in Placemaker - H5 crashing under SMP load   
    ok - so the stock FA image also crashes on the same test - it behaves differently than the Armbian image, as it kills off the threads when it tries to do a privileged memory access...
     
    since we're working with armv8-a, we have kernel space (EL1) and user space (EL0) - hence the data abort, as the memory is marked as EL1, and an EL0 task cannot access that. I think that overclocking the CPU exposes a bug that is latent, even without the overlay, and this goes not to device tree, but to uboot and DDR ram init vectors there.
     
    The stress test (openssl) can show the bug, but this isn't the real problem, and the overlay just enables it to happen faster - getting board temp to around 60c, which on a small board like this, includes not only the SoC, but the DDR, can accelerate this issue, as some DDR can get a bit unstable at that temp.
     
    I don't have much time right now to debug further, as I'm in the middle of sfx's North America Tour - last week Austin, TX, next week Miami, FL, Atlanta, GA, Denver, CO, and a short trip to Salt Lake City, UT - about a week of downtime in the SAN, then back to Austin for a week.
     
    @5kft  -- Gnarly problem to sort, eh? But spending time might help other AW H5 targets...
     
    @Igor -- something to watch maybe
  7. Like
    sfx2000 reacted to hexdump in Choice of TV box.   
    this is just a quick note that in my experience the amount of tv boxes with fake specs has grown quite a bit in the last months and that this is something to always have in mind when getting a box for a surprisingly cheap (i.e. quite a bit cheaper than usual or most of the other offerings) price - you might be lucky and it will be a bargain or you might hit one with fake specs. some examples i saw recently: a qplus 4g ram / 32g emmc ended up to be 2g ram and 16g nand, a h6 box sold as 4g ram / 32g emmc ended up as 2g ram / 16g emmc, a x96mini 2g ram / 16g emmc ended up at only 1g ram / 16g emmc, a r39 2g ram / 16g emmc with rockchip rk3229 ends up as 1g ram / 16g emmc and an allwinner h3 cpu and so on. the fake specs are not that easy to spot: in android they even fake the storage size shown in the storage settings and with a terminal installed even the "free" command tells you most of the time that the memory amount is proper. what usualy works for storage is "cat /proc/partitions" and watching for the device itself (for instance mmcblk0) - this also quickly shows you if its emmc (=mmcblk) or nand (=nand) and for memory "dmesg | grep -i mem" (do this immediately after booting android, otherwise the memory lines from the bootup might run out of the log buffer) - both of course called in a terminal app. booting one of balbes150's armbian images usually quickly shows you the real specs of the box too.
     
    good luck at not ending up with fake boxes and best wishes - hexdump
     
    p.s.: one thing to keep in mind is that allwinner h6 boxes always only can use 3g ram, even if they have 4g installed - this is a limitataion of the soc ...
  8. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from TRS-80 in Surveying the hardware landscape 2019 and beyond, with an eye toward freedom (headless server)   
    Without getting into the file system wars - might consider BTRFS, which is much more GPL friendly...
     
    One of the challenges with the low memory platforms is that ZFS is fairly RAM and compute intense for what it does - that being said, for the right purpose, it's a good file system to look at.
  9. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from TRS-80 in Surveying the hardware landscape 2019 and beyond, with an eye toward freedom (headless server)   
    One of the side benefits of China becoming a surveillance society - Government needs lots of cameras to keep an eye on the folks over in Xinjiang....
  10. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from Jack953 in free software supported wifi card phone usable ESP8089 ESP8266 ESP32?   
    It's really hard to do in a power efficient manner - there are SDR's that can do all the right waveforms, the signalling, etc, but most of this is on an FPGA - the UMTS and LTE protocols are fairly complex, much more so that 802.11 wifi, and we know how hard that can be.
     
    It's also a massive minefield of patents, which makes GPL are very real challenge.
     
    Osmocom.org has made the most progress towards a free modem - https://osmocom.org/
     
     
  11. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from NicoD in Poll : What board images do you trust to use?   
    Depends on the vendor - some do a better job than others...
     
    And there, depends on the SoC's being used.
     
    Not naming names there to avoid slanting the poll...
  12. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from Ali-leb in M1+ wifi   
    Broadcom BCM43438 Wi-Fi 802.11n (2.4GHz only) + Bluetooth 4.1 (Dual Mode) combo chip
  13. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from suberimakuri in RK3328 Kernel   
    Hmm... actually yes - is the role of Armbian to teach users about Linux? Probably not, IMHO, they're better served by the Pi Folks - Raspbian is good training wheels for folks dipping their toes into Linux
     
     
    The average Armbian user is not a paying customer - there are no Service Level Agreements dictating that any bug of a defined severity level must be fixed within a specific timeframe.
     
    So yes - just ignore it for the most part, step in if is sounds fairly interesting - sounds a bit mean spirited perhaps, but generally folks will step in to help out, and if it's really a bug that is directly traceable back to Armbian code - then if it pops up enough, fix it directly, or delegate it to someone who is maintaining it (better to delegate, as that person knows the code likely better).
     
    So if someone has problematic hardware - "my whoflungpI Zero2W with the built in XYZ WiFi adapter doesn't work" - well, it might be crap hardware, and in the sub-$50USD field of hacker boards and TV boxes, there's a fair amount of crap - can't fix bad hardware, and there, someone will tell them, use something that does work.
  14. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from guidol in [Info] colored bash-prompt   
    And for those who live on the command line - byobu is like screen and tmux on steroids - and it's in the ubuntu repos...
     
     
    If one wants to have a fun demo...
     
     
    byobu rocks...
  15. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from Igor in RK3328 Kernel   
    Hmm... actually yes - is the role of Armbian to teach users about Linux? Probably not, IMHO, they're better served by the Pi Folks - Raspbian is good training wheels for folks dipping their toes into Linux
     
     
    The average Armbian user is not a paying customer - there are no Service Level Agreements dictating that any bug of a defined severity level must be fixed within a specific timeframe.
     
    So yes - just ignore it for the most part, step in if is sounds fairly interesting - sounds a bit mean spirited perhaps, but generally folks will step in to help out, and if it's really a bug that is directly traceable back to Armbian code - then if it pops up enough, fix it directly, or delegate it to someone who is maintaining it (better to delegate, as that person knows the code likely better).
     
    So if someone has problematic hardware - "my whoflungpI Zero2W with the built in XYZ WiFi adapter doesn't work" - well, it might be crap hardware, and in the sub-$50USD field of hacker boards and TV boxes, there's a fair amount of crap - can't fix bad hardware, and there, someone will tell them, use something that does work.
  16. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from Igor in RK3328 Kernel   
    Always hard to mask HW w/SW, but that's always been true - and sometimes it's upstream at a chip level errata.
     
    Don't sell the community here short - there are plenty of active contributors here that have specific skills, and some do this kind of work in their day jobs - but it is a valid point that it's unpaid, volunteer time, and resources are never enough.
     
    The fact that Armbian is on the radar as a serious distro is a good sign of the quality of the community.
  17. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from gprovost in Helios64 Annoucement   
    16MB SPI NOR is a good choice, not just for uBoot, but one could put an entire operating system in there (openwrt for example)
     
     
    I agree - @chwe - solder down is going to offer benefit of cost and board space - 16GB is plenty of space considering the other connectivity.
     
    @gprovost - nice board...
  18. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from markbirss in Very Small Platforms - Rockchip 3308 and Allwinner V3s   
    Have been exploring Dingleberry Pi 2
     
    QC/Atheros IPQ4019 - more relevant here for the ARM folks - IPQ4019 is a quad core Cortex-A7@800MHz
     
    Buys us GigE on WAN/LAN ports, along with ATH10K for dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n/AC Wave2 along with USB3.0 for the USB user facing port.
     
    BOM cost is higher, as it manf. costs with more layers, and more power needs - and numbers there do not make sense for an affordable board for this community - $100 GOGS there...
  19. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from markbirss in Very Small Platforms - Rockchip 3308 and Allwinner V3s   
    Quick update on DingleBerry Pi...
     
    Schematics - done - It's essentially a respin of the QC/Atheros reference design into a Pi board form factor.
    Layout/Gerbers - done - 4 layer board, single sided - nice to have a friend with an Orcad license from Cadence.
     
    Specifics
    MIPS24kc @ 650Mhz - big endian 802.11n - ATH9K driver - 2*2:2 for 300Mbps at 2.4GHz (wide channels) - PCB trace antennas Two 100Base-2 Ethernet - WAN dedicated port, LAN on switched port One USB-A for peripherals MicroUSB for Power/Console 32MB SPI-NOR flash - uboot and OS 128MB SPI-NAND flash - extending FS for application and user space 64MB DDR2 RAM SW - OpenWRT Master on the ATH79 target Bootloader - uboot with Pepe2K mods (web server fail-safe)  
    The 4351 does have PCIe, but I've decided not to implement
     
    Performance Targets:
    Reference board is good for 100Mbps WiFi and NAT LAN/WAN performance so fairly balanced there. Power - 5V5DC, 1000ma for PS - right now with everything active on reference design, we're around 850ma at max load.  
    BOM is reasonable, COGS says we're around $50USD to cover the NRE and breakeven with 1K boards with kits (box, cables, boards, ac adapter)
     
    I will not build/ship at a loss... So the next step before doing the engineering sample boards it to gauge the potential market interest.
  20. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from TonyMac32 in Very Small Platforms - Rockchip 3308 and Allwinner V3s   
    Quick update on DingleBerry Pi...
     
    Schematics - done - It's essentially a respin of the QC/Atheros reference design into a Pi board form factor.
    Layout/Gerbers - done - 4 layer board, single sided - nice to have a friend with an Orcad license from Cadence.
     
    Specifics
    MIPS24kc @ 650Mhz - big endian 802.11n - ATH9K driver - 2*2:2 for 300Mbps at 2.4GHz (wide channels) - PCB trace antennas Two 100Base-2 Ethernet - WAN dedicated port, LAN on switched port One USB-A for peripherals MicroUSB for Power/Console 32MB SPI-NOR flash - uboot and OS 128MB SPI-NAND flash - extending FS for application and user space 64MB DDR2 RAM SW - OpenWRT Master on the ATH79 target Bootloader - uboot with Pepe2K mods (web server fail-safe)  
    The 4351 does have PCIe, but I've decided not to implement
     
    Performance Targets:
    Reference board is good for 100Mbps WiFi and NAT LAN/WAN performance so fairly balanced there. Power - 5V5DC, 1000ma for PS - right now with everything active on reference design, we're around 850ma at max load.  
    BOM is reasonable, COGS says we're around $50USD to cover the NRE and breakeven with 1K boards with kits (box, cables, boards, ac adapter)
     
    I will not build/ship at a loss... So the next step before doing the engineering sample boards it to gauge the potential market interest.
  21. Like
    sfx2000 reacted to gprovost in Helios64 Annoucement   
    Hi guys,
     
    I guess some might have heard that we (Kobol Team) were spinning a new project to succeed to Helios4. Here it is... Helios64
     

     
     
    We didn't have to look too far for the board name since in essence the goal was to redesign from scratch Helios4 with a 64-bit SoC and try to improve every key features that made Helios4 a very targeted board for NAS setup.
     
    Right now we are at the prototyping test phase, hopefully in a 2 month time will have dozen of Eval boards to send around for evaluation and review... and if all goes well first batch should be available for order in Feb / March 2020.
     
    Happy to answer any question :-)
     
  22. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from gounthar in SBC recommendations for a wireless router   
    EspressoBIN is ok - has it's limitations, but living within them, it's good - good enough that pfSense/NetGate built a FreeBSD routing distro on it as a commercial product.
     
    EspressoBIN is interesting for many, as not only Armbian, but it's supported in other distro's, and OpenWRT has full support.
     
    If you don't mind OpenWRT - the GL-Inet B1300 is a great little box - It's based on the Qualcomm Atheros IPQ4028, which is a routing chipset with working dual-band WiFi - the factory firmware is built off Qualcomm's QSDK fork of OpenWRT (Chaos Calmer), and there's full support in OpenWRT 18.06 and master...
     
    QSDK has all the QCA accelerators for routing offload, and the closed source Wave2 Wifi drivers, so it's very well sorted.
     
    Factory firmware also includes OpenVPN Client/Server, along with Wireguard Client/Server, and gives direct access to OpenWRT's LUCI interface - their UI is a skin of LUCI, and for many might be good enough. I should mention that it also has Cloudflare DNS-over-TLS support built in - and all the OPKG's that OpenWRT has in their distro.
     
    For $90USD, it's a lot of bang for the buck, and a very hackable little device.
     
    root@192.168.0.1's password: BusyBox v1.25.1 (2019-01-10 15:04:51 CST) built-in shell (ash) MM NM MMMMMMM M M $MMMMM MMMMM MMMMMMMMMMM MMM MMM MMMMMMMM MM MMMMM. MMMMM:MMMMMM: MMMM MMMMM MMMM= MMMMMM MMM MMMM MMMMM MMMM MMMMMM MMMM MMMMM' MMMM= MMMMM MMMM MM MMMMM MMMM MMMM MMMMNMMMMM MMMM= MMMM MMMMM MMMMM MMMM MMMM MMMMMMMM MMMM= MMMM MMMMMM MMMMM MMMM MMMM MMMMMMMMM MMMM= MMMM MMMMM, NMMMMMMMM MMMM MMMM MMMMMMMMMMM MMMM= MMMM MMMMMM MMMMMMMM MMMM MMMM MMMM MMMMMM MMMM= MMMM MM MMMM MMMM MMMM MMMM MMMM MMMM MMMM$ ,MMMMM MMMMM MMMM MMM MMMM MMMMM MMMM MMMM MMMMMMM: MMMMMMM M MMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMM MMMMMMM MMMMMM MMMMN M MMMMMMMMM MMMM MMMM MMMM M MMMMMMM M M M --------------------------------------------------------------- For those about to rock... (Chaos Calmer, r48067) --------------------------------------------------------------- root@GL-B1300:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l) BogoMIPS : 26.81 Features : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xc07 CPU revision : 5 processor : 1 model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l) BogoMIPS : 26.81 Features : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xc07 CPU revision : 5 processor : 2 model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l) BogoMIPS : 26.81 Features : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xc07 CPU revision : 5 processor : 3 model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l) BogoMIPS : 26.81 Features : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xc07 CPU revision : 5 Hardware : Qualcomm (Flattened Device Tree) Revision : 0000 Serial : 0000000000000000  
     
  23. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from TonyMac32 in Very Small Platforms - Rockchip 3308 and Allwinner V3s   
    I've been following that project - good work there...
  24. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from TonyMac32 in Very Small Platforms - Rockchip 3308 and Allwinner V3s   
    Here's something crazy - found this in my goodie/junk box... mad dog linux something or other - from back in 2006 timeframe - well before kickstarter.
     
    PowerPC device implemented on an FPGA - the shiny item is a fingerprint sensor that would log a person in...
     
    Mounted as a mass-storage device, with a lightweight desktop environment that one would run in Windows 98...
     
    The SD Card (or maybe MMC) was for storage for the linux space, booted off the internal flash...
     

  25. Like
    sfx2000 got a reaction from guidol in Very Small Platforms - Rockchip 3308 and Allwinner V3s   
    Here's something crazy - found this in my goodie/junk box... mad dog linux something or other - from back in 2006 timeframe - well before kickstarter.
     
    PowerPC device implemented on an FPGA - the shiny item is a fingerprint sensor that would log a person in...
     
    Mounted as a mass-storage device, with a lightweight desktop environment that one would run in Windows 98...
     
    The SD Card (or maybe MMC) was for storage for the linux space, booted off the internal flash...
     

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