NanoPi M4 questions

[Patrick U]

Hello everybody,

 

I am new to this forum, and stumbled upon Armbian while looking for OS options for the NanoPi M4 board. Great work!

 

The board is running well now, but I do have a few questions:

1.  Armbian is WIP, but as NicoD says it's actually very stable. Any idea when it's going to "supported" officially?
2.  I did have an issue with the 4.4 kernel, which I worked around. How is your experience with more recent kernels, is it advisable to upgrade? Or will the official image be upgraded from the LibreElec kernel? (Compiling a kernel still seems a little bit daunting to me, although I did it on x86 chips years ago).
3.  What timeframe is to be expected for upgrading to Debian 10, once "it's ready"? I don't need a full-blown server at home (using it for Nextcloud, mainly), so those low-power SBC are great fun but I'm trying to make my mind up whether to consider a self-build x86 server (based on Ryzen 3 2200GE) or whether I should go "all in" on NanoPi M4 and Armbian.

Regards,

-Patrick

[GeraltOfTrivia]

Kernel 4.4 is definitely more stable than 5.x kernels. However I have managed to achieve almost gigabit file transfer speeds with samba with 5.x kernels. With 4.4.x kernels, I can't get past 70 MB/sec with the exact same settings no matter what I do.  I've noticed everything from occasional crashes to the system crashing every 5 minutes under mild load with 5.x kernels, which didn't happen with 4.4.x (same PSU). So your mileage may vary. Take it with a grain of salt, these are just my experiences so far. Oh and if you try the Armbian 5.x dev images and you run your M4 from your sd card, yeah those images are bugged (at least for me). For some reason mmc1 gets a frequency of 50 MHz instead of 150 MHz and the transfer rate is crippled at 22 MB/sec. 

[Patrick U]

Thank you for your answer.

Performance is OK for my needs right now, so I don't feel like trading stability for performance I don't really need, especially since I host a lot of data on my Nextcloud.