forever_ noob

I ended up working this out with the help of this post - specifically, if you add the following to /boot/armbianEnv.txt, you can force the video mode.
 
Some examples:
 
640x480
extraargs=drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=HDMI-A-1:edid/640x480.bin video=HDMI-A-1:640x480-24@60  
1080p
extraargs=drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=HDMI-A-1:edid/1920x1080.bin video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080@60  
I didn't have to install any extra packages or anything using Armbian Debian Stretch / 4.14.78-sunxi, it just worked out of the box (edid files already installed/etc).

I never know what to get anyone.  If I'm being honest I have more than a little disdain for how commercialized the holidays have become nowadays.  We were not raised in a materialistic way growing up.  A lot of gifts were socks and other actually useful things like that (which I only appreciate now as I get older ).  Anyway...
 
So when some of the guys shared some pictures of themselves with some Armbian swag in IRC a while back, a little light bulb went off in my head. 
 
So this morning, I went nuts and spent > 400 USD sending everyone in my family some Armbian swag.    I figure, it's a good way to get the word out there to friends and family about a project I care a lot about, while supporting the project a bit financially at the same time.
 
   
 
I don't expect anyone else to spend that sort of money, in fact I am a tight wad and rarely do, myself.  But a coffee mug or something might be nice?
 
I also don't like to rush people (because I don't like to be rushed, myself), however if you are going for delivery before the holidays I would place your order ASAP, maybe even today.
 
One final gotcha, their credit card processor apparently only allow 2 orders per day.  Luckily I had sent orders to other family first, because my third order was denied.  I called their customer support and they confirmed this issue and told me to try again after 24 hours.  So the stuff that is coming here for us I will place that order (again) tomorrow.  I just wanted to give everyone a heads up about that though.

I have been having some long running, on and off discussion with @lanefu in IRC (and elsewhere), because I know this is his area of expertise.  However he is busy, and I can appreciate he might not want to spend his free time talking about stuff he gets paid to do M-F. 
 
Then I also realized, certainly I am not the only one interested in Armbian in order to be doing such things.  So I thought I would make a thread about this, instead, to open the discussion to a larger group people here in the broader community.
 
I have my own thoughts, concerns, things I want to do, and have already done, but I thought I would make a more general thread where like minded people can discuss their experiences, what has worked (or not), what services you might be running (or would like to), etc.
 
I guess I will begin by saying I have been running some services for family and friends, first on a Cubietruck since maybe 2017 (or earlier?) and then later on some ODROID-XU4 in addition.  I run XMPP server (Prosody) which has been very hassle free "just works" as well as some experiments into Home Automation and other things which have had some, well let's just say mixed results. 
 
Currently my interest is in containers and like technologies, but I am very new to it.  I been reading a lot, but there is so much to know and I can't help but feel I am a bit late to the game.  That's by design though, as I don't like being (too) early of a technology adopter, generally speaking.  Well, certainly not with such "hyped" technologies like containers, anyway.
 
In fact I thought it was a bunch of baloney and hype for a long time, but even cranky old cynic like me now sees some advantages of abstracting things, changing servers/services from "pets" to "cattle" if you will, for reproducibility, redundancy, and other reasons.
 
Anyway, I am prone to walls of text of idiotic ramblings, so I will stop here and give some others a chance.    Hope everyone is enjoying their holiday weekend so far. 

Amazing! Nice review @NicoD!

Today I had the pleasure of benchmarking an ARM64 server.
This server has been made available for Armbian to test native ARM64 image building.
I knew nothing about the server. Nobody told me any details.
So everything was an adventure for me to find out. I got SSH access, so my research began.

A lscpu informed me it had 32-cores all clocked at 3.3Ghz. 
 
cat /proc/cpuinfo confirmed these 32-cores
 
Checking on what kernel we're on. Ubuntu Focal 5.4.0-52-generic. 
And how much memory. 128GB RAM.

So first thing I wanted to know, how does one core perform with 7-zip benchmark?
The record I had seen until now was from the A73 cores from the Odroid N2+ clocked at 2.4Ghz. 2504MIPS decompression.
So :
taskset -c 31 7z b
 
This beats the Odroid N2+ its A73 cores clocked at 2.4Ghz. 2763 vs 2504MIPS decompression. 
This also tells me these cores do not perform as good per clock as a high performance core. 
While doing the single core benchmark I checked the sensors to know the wattage and temperature.
 
CPU power is about 20W for a single core tasks. 
Without a load the CPU consumes between 10W-15W. So in total it consumes a bit more than 20W in idle.
Temperature never went under 49C even after +5 minutes in idle. 
 
Of course, the next thing to do is an all-core 7zip benchmark. 
This gives an amazing result. Way higher than anything I had ever seen on ARM.
 
85975MIPS decompression. This is amazing.
Best I had seen was 11000MIPS of the Odroid N2+. So this server does 8 x better than the N2+. 
Tho, I must say. 7zip does bad with unequal clusers. The N2+ has a great difference in cluster frequencies. So it performs worse then expected here. 

The wattage went a lot higher, up to 110W. And the temperature rose quickly up to 75C in seconds.
 
To test the internet connection I downloaded an Armbian image multiple times. Sometimes it was as low as 3MB/s. 
Highest average speed I've seen was 12.5MB/s
 
Next test. BMW Blender render benchmark. 
Here the fastest I had ever seen was by the Khadas VIM3. That did it in 42m51s.
I haven't done this yet with the N2+ in Armbian. In Odroid's Ubuntu it was a little slower. I expect it to be a little faster than the VIM3 in Armbian Bionic. 
This is a tile based test. So every core gets its own task, until all tiles are done. 

Well, this ARM64 server did this in 8m27s. 
5 x faster compared to the Khadas VIM3. 

For this the wattage didn't go over 85W. But the temperature did rise to 83C. So it started to throttle. 

@lanefu already had done SBC-Bench on it when it was free. So this I didn't have to do myself.
http://ix.io/2Dcc
Here we see a lot. For example the CPUMiner did : 81.0kH/s 
The Odroid N2+                                                         : 14 kH/s         5.7 x less 
RK3399 does a maximum of                                     : 10.23kH/s     8 x less
Odroid C2 clocked at 1.75Ghz                                   : 4.65kH/s       17 x less

So this server clearly can move a lot of bits around. 
Now, what is this server? Ask google if nobody else tells me. "32 core ARM server 3.3Ghz"
First answer : https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/18/ampere_shipping/
That looks like it is this CPU. But still I can't find the exact name. 
2nd answer : https://www.servethehome.com/ampere-32-core-64-bit-arm-chip-x-gene-3-ip/
So this is the Ampere 32-core 64-bit from X-Gene 3 IP.

Here the wikichip : https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/apm/x-gene/apm883832-x3?fbclid=IwAR0ljCQ61DY8Zwh_VyZd0fQH43dmPUTJA-CGLiQKYqU2fWwszFm1CPjH6Zo

This supports up to 1TB RAM. 8 channels @ 2666Mhz. With a maximum memory bandwidth of 158.95 GiB/s.
42 lanes of PCIe Gen 3, with 8 controllers
– x16 or two x8/x4
– x16 or two x8/x4
– x8 or two x4
– Two x1

4 x SATA Gen 3 ports, 2 x USB2. And a TDP of 125W TDP.

For me this is just an awesome thing to behold. I use ARM for almost everything.
The NanoPi M4V2 is my main desktop computer.
It isn't as powerful as my PC, but does the task for 10 x less power consumption, while being completely silent.

But when I need a big CPU, it isn't enough.
Even the more powerful Odroid N2+ isn't powerful enough to render long, +20minutes 1440p video's for example for my Youtube channel.
So then i need to use my x86/amd64 PC. 

Today I have seen and tasted the future. 
While this doesn't use the most modern Cortex/clusters. And it is only 16nm.
So there is still a lot of room for improvements in performance and lower power consumption. 

ARM for desktop is possible, and ARM servers for big datacenters is possible(AWS). I have seen the future, I loved every second of it. 

Here benchmarks compared to my SBCs

 

Greetings, NicoD

In case if it doesn't work, check here: https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/master/packages/extras-buildpkgs/hostapd/debian and build from sources. But its possible that noscan need some code adjustment due to upstream changes: https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/

Okay, np. Just wanted to make sure and avoid being defeated by a trivial issue