TRS-80

I'm just starting to get into the specifics of Allwinner, so my interests in this area are limited to H6 and H5 (in the future, H616). A year ago, I was interested in the possibility of acquiring PinePhone and PinebucPro, but due to the peculiarities of delivery in my area, Pine64 politely explained that this is not possible (I have no complaints about them, this is their business, they decide how to run it).

After having the NanoPi Neo 3 in use for some time, I can say the white case shipped by FriendlyElec is a little problematic seen from the site of cooling down the CPU.
The colocation room has full AC with 15 *C room temp but under high load, the CPU temp goes up to 61-62 *C.
I think something like this might be a better choise because the air flow is much higher:
 
https://www.ebay.at/itm/333921941529
 
The producer of this case told me another case with the possibility to add a 40 cm fan gets addet soon. Might even be better!

The NanoPi R1 is running in the DC for 17 days now.
But with one port connected (GBit WAN port) its getting ~26 MBits traffic in both directions done. A little bit disappointing as i had high hopes to see another beast like the Neo 3 in it.
I will try to connect the second port and split incomming/outgoing traffic between WAN/LAN port. Maybe this gives some better results. If not, i see no reason for this one to have twice the price of the Neo 3.
We will see...

Are you sure you need to containerize the WireGuard installation?  Because WireGuard should basically "just work" in recent kernels...

Suddenly it makes sense what I read in the recently published March Update: Status Report:
 
 

We can't say their motivation is bad within this move, but MS loves Linux is still a wolf disguised into a sheep. As bad intention can only be classified as a speculation and it is hard to prove they are actually doing something bad, making it possible or have a direct possibility is bad enough. If folks, one don't trust, have root and if they also control your ignition ... 

Raspberry Pi OS started to secretly (!?) adding Microsoft proprietary package base, access to their servers, by default. 
 
Security consequences? tl;dr; ... Microsoft gained root access to millions of Rpi users without their consent or awareness. From the outside. This is bad, but it is actually much worse since from the inside they already have full control of your Raspberry Pi regardless of operating system of your choice. Linux/BSD/* can't boot without proprietary Microsoft owned real time OS.
 
Most of the RPi users probably just don't care, others are naively assuming they are running FOSS software. Well, a part of it is, a part not. Not as bad as Android, but still. You can peek into the code, but at the end, Google, or lets say corpo world, is/are fully in charge of our mobile devices. Mainly with services.
 
After recent Chromium improvements, this is yet another loss for (Linux) community and FOSS in general.
 
http://techrights.org/2021/02/02/microsoft-pi/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3536569/inside-microsofts-latest-os-azure-rtos.html
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-distributors-frustrated-by-googles-new-chromium-web-browser-restrictions/

Maybe, maybe not. If their CompaTability nonsense can simply be ignored, and the ARM cores are in control, then yes. If VC6 is running the show, it is the same. :-/

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An RPi is not

1) reliable
2) the most cost-effective
3) worth $35
4) worth any more discussion.

The position of this project stands, we will not support a failure prone, insecure, underperforming, inefficient, abysmally bandwidth throttled device. If an RPi 4 comes out that uses a sane bootloader and a useful SoC then this can be revisited.

Do not continue your personal argument with Tido; it is not value-added, and your positions add nothing other than conflict. Mostly because you have no facts or reason for your position, and instead of trying to formulate something approaching a case for support resort to ad hominem attacks and downright inaccuracies. This is an unofficial warning to stop harassing the team because you aren't getting your way. The next will be official.

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Sorry about the bad vibes.   Honestly I think we need to do a better job at lowering expectations.     RPI sets a high standard for general user experience because of the limited scope of targeted devices, volume of developers and community, and defaulting first to out-of-tree drivers, blobs, and resources via NDA's with Broadcom to ship a product that has full software functionality to accompany its hardware.

Alternative SBC vendors often create a false-promise of users having a similar experience with their product by the way marketing hardware capabilities and leaning on the reputation of RPI by selling a similar product.
 
End-result is users buy these alternative SBCs, have a terrible experience, hear Armbian is the best, come to Armbian and have better software, but Armbian still focuses on mainline, so the experience isn't that of RPI and articulating the many nuances as to WHY Armbian can't just work like the Raspian experience on RPi because challenging.    Then the fall-out ensues when newer users treat Armbian like a vendor and share their dissatisfaction that a capability for a piece of hardware they bought from someone else isn't work with community software integrated or provided by Armbian.
 
We could certainly use more tenured technical people to help articulate that message.

You are free to think and believe what you want. As is Armbian free to use or not to use if you don't want to.
There are very good reasons why Armbian does not support Raspberry Pi. There is software available for RPis, so the need for Armbian isn't big.
RPi isn't open source as the other supported SBCs.(ThreadX) 
The installed OS does not control the board. There are things happening without anyone knowing what and why.

RPi can be used for some goals. But it is too buggy to support. Undervoltages, overheating, not showing true details...

And as you say yourself, Armbian is a "community". Not a cult. We have community members, not leaders. I even think the person you talk about hasn't had anything to do with armbian for a long time. And even if I would not agree with that person. I defend his right to talk the way he feels like. 
Not everyone is always as gentle in how they talk. We are all adults, and I think we should be able to handle that. 
Go look at RPi fora and let me know what kind of talk you find their. Even having a light discussion isn't possible their. 
Greetings.

@Igor
run glmark2 on default compositor mode (auto is GLX)
we get glmark results 5-6 times lower than on xpresent mode.
 
to test it:
xfwm4 --vblank=xpresent --replace
 
to replace it by default (this will work after reboot)
xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/vblank_mode -t string -s "xpresent" --create
 
rerun glmark2... you will see the differences. 
at this point it's quite ridiculous that xfce4 compositor defaults to GLX... mesa devs hate it... his drivers too.  
 
 
 

I also got the same email, three days ago now ... three failed attempts from London UK, and three from Finland... not even the right continent... needless to say, nice long new password generated.

@TRS-80 I think it's important once in a while to re-question the whole thing because it helps to clarify the real objective that we might sometimes forget... or justify that energy should be focused somewhere else.
 
I think ultimately the life of a distro will always depends on the size of its user base and lets distinguish here community and user base. User base includes all the passive users that we never hear from, I have no clue how much that represent for Armbian. @Igor Maybe you have such numbers : number of d/l per image and number of active forum user ? Even though this will not necessary help to say if armband-config is useful, it will help to give a sense of proportion of user we never hear from which to my assumption are often users that don't hack/tinker too much with their boards.
 
Then I think it could be useful to run a poll on the forum & twitter and simply ask what the people are using their SBC + Armbian for :
1/ Hacking / Tinkering
2/ Headless server
3/ Set-top TV box
4/ Work Desktop
 
Such kind of poll could will help understand the audience usage. If the great majority vote for option 1, then it would back up @TRS-80 assumption. But if majority is 3 and 4, then clearly we are talking about a user based that is not really CLI oriented. As for option 2, is a bit 50 / 50.
 
We should also be aware of what's happening out there.
1/ DietPi user base is growing and I guess it's because of their approach of making a big eco system of 3rd party app available to user via an interface a bit similar to armbian-config.
2/ Debian / Ubuntu install, even in headless mode, is actually not purely CLI so we all get use to a bit of GUI even if we are advanced CLI users.
 
I agree with Igor that the strength of armbian-config is also a lot the configuration features (without forgetting nand-sata-install which also deserve its attention). So personally I see a big plus to have armbian-config around, because it can only help to widen the user base which in fine is beneficial to Armbian sustainability.
 
Yes that's a lot of assumption I made, It's why I think the poll would be really a nice driver for this refactoring effort.

I received an email notification same as title of this post 2 days ago.  Just now I changed my password.  But I thought I would make a post to see if anyone else might have been targeted (as I am a Moderator), especially any other Admins or Moderators.
 
I am going to ping everyone I can think of (actually, I simply use the list here) below, but please add anyone else who I miss.
 
@Igor @lanefu @Werner @TonyMac32 @SteeMan @soerenderfor @pfeerick @NicoD @JMCC @balbes150 @_r9

I received an email notification same as title of this post 2 days ago.  Just now I changed my password.  But I thought I would make a post to see if anyone else might have been targeted (as I am a Moderator), especially any other Admins or Moderators.
 
I am going to ping everyone I can think of (actually, I simply use the list here) below, but please add anyone else who I miss.
 
@Igor @lanefu @Werner @TonyMac32 @SteeMan @soerenderfor @pfeerick @NicoD @JMCC @balbes150 @_r9

I received an email notification same as title of this post 2 days ago.  Just now I changed my password.  But I thought I would make a post to see if anyone else might have been targeted (as I am a Moderator), especially any other Admins or Moderators.
 
I am going to ping everyone I can think of (actually, I simply use the list here) below, but please add anyone else who I miss.
 
@Igor @lanefu @Werner @TonyMac32 @SteeMan @soerenderfor @pfeerick @NicoD @JMCC @balbes150 @_r9

Dear Armbian community,
 
although I'm using Armbian a lot, I never had to submit anything to this forum (fortunately, because it works so well :-)),
 
On my PC I've experienced lags on heavy IO operations. After a short dig into available information,
I found a useful Cloudflare article on Kernel queues together with dm-crypt.
 
A good & short summary on possible actions for users can be found here:
 
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt/Specialties#Disable_workqueue_for_increased_solid_state_drive_(SSD)_performance
 
Enabling the no-read-workqueue & no-write-workqueue options helped a lot!
 
 
As I'm using a RockPi4 with the NVMe SSD with encryption, I thought this should apply to my SBC as well.
 
Unfortunately, Armbian/Debian Buster uses cryptsetup v2.1.0
 
which does NOT support these options.
According to the changelog, this option was introduced in v2.3.4:
https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetup/-/blob/master/docs/v2.3.4-ReleaseNotes
 
As Armbian uses a kernel > 5.9, the kernel infrastructure should be available.
 
Fortunately, crypsetup v2.3.4 exists in the buster-backports repo:
https://packages.debian.org/buster-backports/cryptsetup
 
Solution:
 
# sudo apt install cryptsetup/buster-backports
 

I received an email notification same as title of this post 2 days ago.  Just now I changed my password.  But I thought I would make a post to see if anyone else might have been targeted (as I am a Moderator), especially any other Admins or Moderators.
 
I am going to ping everyone I can think of (actually, I simply use the list here) below, but please add anyone else who I miss.
 
@Igor @lanefu @Werner @TonyMac32 @SteeMan @soerenderfor @pfeerick @NicoD @JMCC @balbes150 @_r9

I had to try 🤓

Release Planning: April 3rd. Meeting in IRC channel #armbian on freenode. Meeting starts at 2pm GMT.
(let me know if this is a bad date, because it is around easter holiday in Germany for example)
 
Code Freeze: 2021-04-19 (Monday April 19th)
Release Date: 2021-05-09 (Sunday May 9th)
Release Candidate: https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/v21.05.0-rc
Changelog: https://docs.armbian.com/Release_Changelog/#v2105-2021-05-09
Coordinator: @Heisath
 
The goal of this thread is to discuss testing, bugfixes, and the overall quality of the release. 
 
Open topics:
- complete desktop branch merge into master (this seems generally done, but might need fine tuning)
- enable 3D support (also done? Bugfixing)
- discuss support for desktops (IIRC it was planned to have a longer supported LTS desktop version, we need a maintainer for that, if it happens)
- check if remaining boards can / have been updated to LK5.10 (some were left out last release)
- check possible u-boot updates
- complete remaining Jira issues
- cycle and check board support status (espressobin for example needs a new maintainer (otherwise EOS) @Pali maybe?)
- late topics: 
- business meeting schedule
- kernel config changes on arm64
 
Release Planning Meeting Agenda:
 
Please add developers and more topics below, I will then also add them here.
@Myy @TonyMac32 @balbes150 @piter75 @sfx2000 @ebin-dev @chwe @ning @lanefu @gprovost @aprayoga @5kft @JMCC @martinayotte @going @jeanrhum @dolphs @jock @belfastraven @TRS-80 @Bozza @Rich Neese @sgjava @Mangix @Pali

Good!  Let them read some books, lest they never become as studious as their father! 

I don't follow the cluster stuff as much as you do lanefu (yet) but because of my recent interest in Pine64 I became aware they sell a CLUSTERBOARD with 7 slots for their SOPINE A64 COMPUTE MODULEs.  Now of course being A64 based these would be less powerful than what you are describing in OP (as well as having different form factor), however OTOH these are actual things you can buy in their store, right now.
 
Not sure how relevant PCIe lanes are to cluster computing, but I guess it depends what the work load is.  Especially if the workload is not CPU based, that could potentially be a killer feature.
 
I also cannot help but speculate it might be too niche a market to interest some mfr.  But what do I know.  A counter point, Pine64 are selling something already in this space, so... who knows?
 
EDIT: I was just watching some NicoD video and was reminded that ODROID N2+ might be even better for this.  The I/O is hobbled (shared USB) but has Gigabit Ethernet (not PoE though) but rates pretty high in his CPU/rendering type benchmarks.
 
Also, I know, it's a "dream" thread, so I hope you don't mind too much my mini review of current solutions (as a comparison, or in case anyone is looking now).  OK, back to "dreaming"... 

Here's the video.
Thank you @balbes150 for the images and @JMCCfor the media script.
Now I can start with something else