Jump to content

BPiM3 Fresh stuff (?)


eternalWalker

Recommended Posts

 

They don't get it. They simply don't get it.

  • Using their crappy outdated u-boot+kernel together with a manipulated Armbian rootfs: WRONG
  • Using the Armbian build system to benefit from latest patches, online upgrades, increased quality (as suggested so many times to them already but talking to @sinovoip is like taking to a wall): RIGHT

But they don't get the idea. All they do is constantly providing one crappy OS image after the other. And if they 'create' a good one (like the OpenELEC build that ONLY works on BPi M2+ since it's simply jernej's OpenELEC for H3 with their script.bin) they immediately start to fool their customers trying to create the impression they did the coding and it would be just a matter of time until they release OpenELEC for BPi M3.

 

BTW: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/474-quick-review-of-banana-pi-m3/?view=getlastpost

Link to comment
Share on other sites

But what can you advise me? I hide the "M3" in a drawer and wait for a new 4' kernel?

 

No idea (what to do with this board -- I received a test sample but would never buy it)

 

And I would not use it as server connected to the internet based on this 3.4.39 kernel. In the meantime a few linux-sunxi devs working on A83T added M3 support to u-boot 2016.05-rc1 and it shouldn't be that hard to apply all the patches from 3.4.40 up to 3.4.112 to make the whole thing at least a bit less insecure. And the Foxconn people realized that when they start just a little bit contributing to community (for example donating dev boards to Hans and wens) things might improve a lot. So maybe next year BPi M3 will be supported appropriately in mainline kernel.

 

But to be honest: I still have no idea what to do with M3. It's simply way too slow for my use cases and compared to better devices like OPi Plus 2E too expensive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

66 Euros (incl. shipping!)  is not a fortune, and of this actually the chapest (from what I found) octa core Board.

 

Yeah, that's the whole selling point of A83T (and BPi M3 as well): Count of CPU cores that impresses certain people. Somewhere I read that's what the chinese Android phone/tablet market demands: More cores and more bits (64 vs. 32 bit) and A83T seems to be made just for that: increase the nearly irrelevant count of CPU cores and decrease the more important count of GPU cores (A83T has only a single core SGX544 where the A31 predecessor had a dual core SGX544MP2 GPU!).

 

Given the nature of most workloads (single threaded), that SinoVoip is still not able to unlock the 2.2Ghz A83T is able to run at and that multithreaded workloads require liquid cooling since otherwise you end up with A83T running at 1.2 GHz max I'm really not that much impressed by this design. Might look nice in silly benchmarks if you increased heat dissipation and took care of killed CPU cores. But that's it. The SoC has pretty limited I/O bandwidth and SinoVoip made it even worse by connecting both internal USB hub and ultra slow USB-to-SATA bridge to one USB host port leaving the 2nd real USB host port unused. I've never seen such an insane design.

 

BTW: 8 cores aren't really that impressive in 2016 especially when we're talking about slow Cortex-A7 implementations. 16/24/32 cores are standard at our customers relying on x86 and I had a few customers running 48/64/128 core Oracle Sparc servers (nice if you run real server tasks in parallel, pretty bad if your applications do not run well on many threads)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use - Privacy Policy - Guidelines