willmore

The patch is applied and should ne in the latest nightly.

If you tested the prebuilt nightly then idle consumption numbers still can change since this one didn't go below 792MHz due to a wrong number in the DT.

For now as already outlined just the DVFS stuff for OPi PC2. And if there's some time later you might try out cpuminer with identical 'environmental' conditions as OPi PC2 just to get an idea how efficient both board designs are regarding heat dissipation through the lower BGA side using the board itself as huge heatsink. But for me personally current status with H5, OPi PC2 and the other announced new devices (mainline kernel, +1.3GHz available, GbE working, count of USB2 ports, price including shipping) means almost every A64 design is already 'dead'/uninteresting now. So there's no need to rush with such comparisons

Very nice  As a comparison: With Pine64 I got 3.9 khash/s at 1296 MHz (with heatsink and IIRC 2 fans). So performance of CPU cores in A64 and H5 is identical but Xunlong did again a great job regarding heat dissipation. Pine64 also uses the ground plane as heatsink but if I remember correctly I got these values on my Pine64 without heatsinks: http://linux-sunxi.org/File:Testing_throttling_and_performance_behaviour_on_Pine64.png
 
@willmore: Would be interesting sometimes later to compare with Pine64 (can't do myself due to both boards in a test setup a few hundred km away). But now stability testing through different DVFS operating points is more interesting. Would be great to let something loop through all available cpufreqs as outlined in #129 above and test with cpuburn-a53, cpuminer and ErwinH's stabilityTester.sh (after applying latest fixes from build system to also walk through the lowest operating points)

My PC2 ran 24 hours of cpuminer on four cores. No crashes, no syslog entries that indicate anything is wrong. Temps 70-75C. Clock speeds 1056/1080MHz. Hashes between 3.2 and 3.3KH/s. No heatsink. No fan. Board in a slightly enclosed space with no additional airflow enhancements. Image from 20170127.
 
I'll reboot to the new kernel and try xhpl and/or Linpac.

I suspect that's where most of the problem is. When I get time I'll setup my sniffing stuff and true to capture what is going on.

I've sent a patch to enable the SY8106A driver in SPL.

Created a small tool that checks the stability of a range of frequencies using HPL. 
 
Simple clone the git and install libmpich-dev and you're good to go.
 
https://github.com/ehoutsma/StabilityTester
 
If you want to increase the load you can alter the HPL.dat and set the Ns to 10960, which is the maximum size you can run on a 1G device before swapping kicks in.
 
Edit: Don't be scared of high temperatures! High temperatures are good!

To check the stability of the board have a look at this post:             #91            
 
It has all the links to the info you need to check the stability of the board.

Preliminary Armbian images with mainline kernel are available (nightly builds that means untested and without any end user support): https://dl.armbian.com/orangepipc2/
 
This is neither an announcement of Armbian support for this device nor anything a typical end user should play with. If you want to watch video go buy an Android TV box, if you want to help improving Linux support and are able and willing to accept that this is just a test image to get stability reports for DVFS then please read through:
https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/commit/9838cc30f47c47a86da1fa0d6ce22ed1098c5706 https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/issues/298 https://github.com/longsleep/build-pine64-image/pull/3 It would be great if we get a lot of feedback on @ErwinH's new dvfs table that means playing around with different workloads, cramp the board in tiny enclosures (read as: eg. cardboard boxes) to let throttling start early, changing max cpufreq by adjusting /etc/defaults/cpufreq-utils and test through different clockspeeds since we need results from a lot of boards to get an idea whether the safety headroom regarding DVFS operating points is ok or needs to be extended.
 
BTW: This is also not a call for stupid requests ('When will Armbian be ready...'). Those will be either deleted or moved to a special thread 'The user requests that prevent any dev doing any more work'.

Very soon? Not sure, this is the new year here in China and China is paralyzed until February 3...

-

Hello evreyone,
 
Once month ago, for the Christmas holidays, I was back in France. A friend of mine ask me some information about a little amp to drive a speaker – PM8403 was the answer – from a little SBC. He showed me his project and I discovered by this time the Orange Pi Zero.
 
Since many years I am using Logitech Media Server to listen to music. I started with a server computer as everybody, then went to the Raspberry few years ago. In another life I realized some projects with Arduino, and dreamed to write something to get an LCD showing me the artist name and song etc... with a SBC.
 
I live in China and here there is no way to have a Raspberry Zero at European cost ( here it’s around 20$, when a v3 is around 27$).
Because of what my friend showed me, one month ago, back in China January 3 I bought 2 OPZ. It took 3 days to come from Shenzen, it was the 512MB Ram version with the SPI on the board. During the holidays I started to learned python (the basis)... 
 
My friend told me to use Armbian, I discovered the website, the forum, the distro. I’ve learned so much in only one month. I’ve managed to install LMS and squeezelite - audio server and client - and it is so easy (I was afraid of that before), I wrote in Python the application I wanted to use for the I2C LCD, I used the GPIO for this project, and discovered plenty of other things.
 
So I would like to thank you very much for your website, for Armbian and for your huge job.
 
I have plenty of questions, of course, but I try to find my myself before to ask, the hard way…
 
And sorry for my poor English.
 
Congratulations and thank you again.

Well, from a distro baker's point of view Pine64 is still an absolute support nightmare
 
Also the average Pine64 backer was mislead by the kickstarter campaign so the high expectations meet a few hardware flaws and people get frustrated since they don't get it that they need quality SD cards or that their crappy phone charger isn't able to reliably power these devices (especially with connected peripherals).
 
From my point of view it should suffice if Armbian is represented on Pine Inc's download pages (which seems to be the case now) and if the stubborn old man who constantly deleted/censored Armbian related information over there gets his moderator status removed since he mis-used it so many times.

Uploaded 2 days ago already: http://linux-sunxi.org/Special:RecentChanges

They are doing a much better job listening to the customers. 
 
My second Zero also includes a SPI flash chip on the back.

Yes, it will be in next releases.

Designed a case for it. Available on thingiverse if anyone interested - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1918590