Research H3 board buyer's guide

[tkaiser]

TL;DR: All available H3 boards do not differ that much. But the few differences sometimes really matter!

 

The following is an attempt to compare the different available H3 SBC that are supported by Armbian. The majority of boards is made by Xunlong but in the meantime two more vendors started cloning the Xunlong boards (and also Olimex is preparing H3 boards as OSHW). Both Foxconn/SinoVoip with their Banana Pi M2+ and FriendlyARM with their NanoPi M1 tried really hard to copy everything as exact as possible (the so called pin mappings -- how the many contacts the used H3 SoC is providing are routed to the outside).

 

All the boards share the same 40 pin GPIO header (trying to be compatible to the newer RPi boards) and since all the other pin mappings are also 99 percent identical you can for example boot a NanoPi M1 with an Armbian image for Orange Pi PC without loosing any functionality (except of camera module) and the same applies to BPi M2+ that will boot happily an Armbian image for Orange Pi Plus 2E (except of camera module and WiFi/BT)

 

In fact all the various H3 boards just differ in a few details: 

• Amount of DRAM
• No, Fast or GBit Ethernet
• Voltage regulator and 'thermal design' (responsible for performance in full load situations)
• Storage capabilities (pseudo SATA and eMMC or not)
• Count of available USB ports (with or w/o internal USB hub)
• Some additional features like camera modules, WiFi/BT and additional/optional connectors (here it's important to check for driver functionality/availability. If there's no driver providing the necessary functionality then these 'additional features' are pretty much useless -- camera connector for example)

Why focussing on the H3 SoC for this comparison?

• Since some of these boards are priced pretty competitive
• Mainlining support for H3 SoC and these boards is progressing really nicely so we'll be able to run these boards with mainline kernel pretty soon (thanks to the great linux-sunxi community)
• 2D/3D/video HW acceleration is available with legacy kernels (again thanks to the great linux-sunxi community)
• The feature set is nice for many use cases (quad core SoC, GBit Ethernet and 4 useable USB ports on some boards make a really nice low cost/power server)
• It got somewhat confusing regarding the many available Oranges and now also the cloned Banana and NanoPi

This is also in preparation of a broader overview of the capabilities of all the boards Armbian currently supports now focussing on the H3 family. So let's get into details:

 

Amount of DRAM

 

That's an easy one. The H3 SoC supports up to 2 GB DRAM. The available and announced boards use either 512MB, 1 GB or 2 GB DRAM (low-power DDR3L on the bigger Oranges and DDR3 on OPi One/Lite, BPi M2+ and NanoPi M1). In case you're using Armbian it simply depends on the use case. And also it's necessary to understand that Linux tries to use all your RAM for a reason: Since unused RAM is bad RAM. So don't be surprised that Armbian will eat up all your RAM to cache stuff which improves performance of some tasks but the kernel will immediately release it when other tasks have a demand for it. If still in doubt please enjoy http://www.linuxatemyram.com.

 

If you want to use your boards with the unofficial H3 OpenELEC fork too please be aware that OpenELEC benefits from at least 1 GB RAM since then the whole filesystem remains in memory and no accesses to a probably slow SD card happen. Prior to jernej/OpenELEC and Armbian resolving the kswapd bug a few weeks ago the 512 MB equipped boards performed rather poor. But now it seems that the unofficial OpenELEC fork runs pretty well also on the boards with less available RAM.

 

Whether 1 vs. 2 GB RAM make a difference absolutely depends on the use case and no general recommendations can be made.

 

Since OpenELEC has been mentioned it should be noted that the current implementation of the unofficial OpenELEC port for H3 boards makes use of the cedarx-license-issues-library (no clear license preventing the use if you care about legal issues -- please have a look at http://linux-sunxi.org/Kodi for further details)

 

Networking:

 

The H3 SoC contains an Ethernet implementation that is capable of 10/100 MBits/sec Ethernet and also GBit Ethernet. A PHY (that handles the physical interconnection stuff) for Fast Ethernet is already integrated into the H3 SoC but to be able to use GBit Ethernet an external GbE capable PHY is needed (the RTL8211E used on all boards adds approx 1.2$ to the costs of the board in question).

 

Most H3 boards use the internal Fast Ethernet PHY so wired networking maxes out at ~95 Mbits/sec. Orange Pi Plus, Plus 2, Plus 2E and BPi M2+ provide GBit Ethernet (+600 Mbits/sec with legacy and exactly 462 Mbits/sec with mainline kernel) while Orange Pi Lite saves an Ethernet jack at all. The good news: Even with the Lite you can use wired network adding a cheap RealTek USB3-Ethernet dongle like this which is confirmed to exceed 300 Mbits/sec in a single direction.

 

The currently available boards have either no WiFi (NanoPi M1, OPi 2 Mini, One and PC), rely on RealTek 8189ETV (OPi 2, Plus, Plus 2), the newer RealTek 8189FTV (OPi Plus 2E, Lite, PC Plus) or a WiFi/BT combination: AP6181 is used on the BPi M2+ but the vendor didn't manage to get BT working at the time of this writing. Currently only jernej's OpenELEC fork and Armbian have a working driver included for the new 8189FTV chip on the fresh Orange boards that seems to perform quite ok and provides client/AP/monitor mode. Can't say that much about that since in my very personal opinion all these 2.4GHz onboard WiFi solutions are simply crap

 

Voltage regulator and 'thermal design':

 

This is a very important differentation: All Orange Pi boards use a programmable voltage regulator to adjust the voltage the SoC is fed with. The SY8106A used on every Orange except of One and Lite can be controlled though I2C and adjusts the so called VDD_CPUX voltage in 20mV steps. This is important since 'dynamic voltage frequency scaling' relies on the principle of providing less voltage to the SoC/CPU when it clocks lower. So when the board is idle also the supplied voltage will be reduced resulting in less consumption and also less temperature.

 

Since H3 is somewhat prone to overheating being able to adjust VDD_CPUX is also important when we're talking about the opposite of being idle. The SY8106A equipped Oranges reduce very fine grained the core voltage when they start to throttle down in case overheating occurs under constant heavy load. As a direct result they will automagically perform better since reducing VDD_CPUX voltage also reduces temperature/consumption so both CPU and GPU cores in H3 due not have to throttle down that much.

 

Quite the opposite with BPi M2+. For whatever reasons SinoVoip saved put a the same programmable voltage regulator on their board as OPi One, Lite and NanoPi have but does not implement voltage switching so H3 there will always be fed with 1.3V. In addition it seems 'Team BPi' didn't take care of heat dissipation through PCB design (it seems Xunlong added a copper layer to the PCB that helps dramatically spreading the SoC's heat) and so with BPi M2+ (and NanoPi M1 too) you have to be prepared that you need both a heatsink and a fan to let this board perform under full load since otherwise heavy throttling occurs or when you use a kernel that does not implement throttling (4.6/4.7 right now for example) be prepared that H3 gets either destroyed or will crash through overheating if you run something heavy on BPi M2+ or NanoPi M1. We're still investigating whether this crappy thermal behaviour might be related to DRAM also (DDR3 vs. low power DDR3L on the Oranges) It seems this thermal behaviour is not that much related to the DRAM type used but more to PCB design (maybe using large internal ground/vcc planes optimizing heat dissipation on Oranges.

 

NanoPi M1 and Orange Pi One/Lite use a rather primitive GPIO driven voltage regulator that is able to just switch between 1.1V and 1.3V VDD_CPUX which already helps somewhat with throttling.

 

A rather demanding benchmark using cpuminer (a bitcoin miner making heavy use of NEON optimizations and assembler instructions) that knows a benchmark mode where it outputs the khash/s rate. On the left OPI+ 2E with the superiour SY8106A voltage regulator switching CPU frequency between 1200 and 1296 MHz. On the right little OPi Lite with the SY8113B voltage generator able to switch between 1.1V and 1.3V and with slightly lower performance since throttling prevents clocking that high. And in the middle as only board with applied heatsink on H3 poor Banana Pi M2+ using the same SY8113B voltage regulator but always feeding the H3 SoC with 1.3V (for whatever reasons!). 

 

 

Storage capabilities:

 

The H3 SoC doesn't feature native SATA capabilities so the 2 boards that have a SATA connector (Orange Pi Plus and Plus 2) implement that using an onboard USB-to-SATA bridge. Unfortunately the chip used there -- a Genesys Logic GL830 -- is horribly slow limiting sequential transfer speeds to 15 MB/s write and 30 MB/s read. It also does not support the USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) so when using mainline kernel attached disks an especially SSDs couldn't show their full random I/O performance.

 

Given that common USB-to-SATA bridges used in external USB enclosures show way better sequential performance (35 MB/s in both directions and close to 40 MB/s when using an UASP capable bridge together with mainline kernel) the SATA port on these 2 SBC can not be considered a feature worth a buy.

 

Every H3 board has a TF card slot (Micro SD card) and some of the boards feature onboard eMMC storage. The H3 can cope with TF cards that are compliant to the SD, SDHC and SDXC standards so rather large cards with more than 64 GB capacity can also be used (be aware that there do not exist that much cards with a capacity larger than 128 GB. Chances are pretty high to get a counterfeit card especially when the price looks too good to be true ). You should also be aware that all H3 boards show the same sequential speed limitations (maxing out at ~23 MB/s) so choosing cards that are rated way faster aren't worth a buy. Better have a look at random I/O performance that is more important in most use cases.

 

The eMMC used on various boards is pretty fast (sequential speeds maxing out at ~75 MB/s and especially random IO way faster than the fastest tested SD cards which is important for desktop useage and databases for example) so you don't make a mistake choosing any of the eMMC equipped H3 boards (BPi M2+, Orange Pi Plus, Plus 2, Plus 2E or PC Plus). You find detailed test results of current SD/TF cards as well as all the eMMC variants used in these two threads:

• http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/954-sd-card-performance/
• http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/990-testers-wanted-sd-card-performance/

Count of available USB ports:

 

The H3 SoC features 3 USB2.0 host ports and one USB OTG port. With Armbian we configure the OTG port as a host port that shows pretty similar performance so on some H3 boards (Orange Pi PC, PC Plus and Plus 2E) you can benefit from 4 USB2 ports that do not have to share bandwidth.

 

Some other boards use an internal USB hub (Orange Pi 2, Plus, Plus 2) so the available USB ports have to share bandwidth in reality. Please keep that in mind when you compare the 4 USB Type A jacks OPi 2, Plus or Plus 2 feature (all being connected to a USB hub so having to share the bandwidth of a single USB 2.0 host port) with the 3 you can count on OPi PC, Plus 2E or NanoPi M1. On the latter boards you get full USB 2.0 bandwidth on each USB receptacle without the need to share bandwidth.

 

BPi M2+ does also not use an internal USB hub but only exposes 2 USB host ports on type A receptacles and the 3rd host port only without ESC protection via soldering (but since this board shows such a terrible thermal design and is relatively overpriced compared to other H3 boards that doesn't matter that much)

 

Additional features:

 

The only board featuring a Bluetooth capable chip from BroadCom is the BPi M2+. Currently the vendor admits that BT is not working so better don't count on this feature to be ever available.

 

Update: Jernej got BT already working in his OpenELEC fork so it's just a matter of time until it works with Armbian too.

 

The H3 SoC is able to output/intercept additional signals, eg. analog audio, Composite video (TV out), IrDA that are present on most of the boards. On the Orange Pi One many of those interfaces are only present as solder points (a bit too tiny to be used by the average maker) and on some other boards they are not present at all (BPi M2+ for example has neither composite video nor analog audio) so always check first what you need or want to use.

 

We have a nice sortable table in linux-sunxi wiki showing most of the important details: http://linux-sunxi.org/Table_of_Allwinner_based_boards

 

Camera modules:

 

Xunlong provides a pretty cheap 2MP camera module that should work with every H3 Orange Pi out there (they all have the necessary connector but for OPi One, Lite, PC and PC Plus you have to tell Xunlong that you also need a so called 'expansion board' that they ship free of charge if you add to your order that you need it. Starting with Armbian release 5.15 we also include an improved driver for this camera.

 

Regarding current state of available camera modules for Oranges, BPi M2+ and NanoPi M1 please look through this thread: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1213-ov5640-camera-with-orange-pi/?view=getlastpost

[tkaiser]

Since we're now dealing with a few more H3 devices and some vendors also provide OS images and users get confused a small note regarding kernel situation with H3 at the moment and also an update regarding performance relevant settings (by tweaking these intelligently H3 devices might run multiple times faster!).

 

Mainline kernel:

 

The linux-sunxi guys are doing a great job writing all the stuff necessary from scratch and sending it upstream so that H3 and boards are more and more supported by the stock linux kernel available from kernel.org. For us at Armbian the missing Ethernet driver for H3 was the showstopper that prevented us releasing Armbian images with kernel 4.x so far. 

 

In the meantime or since we had to realize how horribly some H3 boards might overheat (BPi M2+ is currently the worst example but it turned out that NanoPi M1 and Beelink X2 behave the same) missing THS support in mainline kernel is another important reason that prevents Armbian releases for H3 boards. We tried to run the boards downclocked to just 816 MHz just to realize recently that BPi M2+ with specific test workloads has to throttle down to 240 MHz (and needs to kill CPU cores so under worst case conditions we could drive the M2+ only with 2 cores at 240 MHz which is a really bad joke -- so we need throttling working with mainline kernel to release Armbian vanilla images to the public)

 

BSP kernel:

 

So while we're testing with mainine kernel stuff from time to time all we now have to release to endusers are some variants of Allwinner's Android kernel for H3 devices (called BSP kernel -- BSP is for 'board support package', that's an ugly tarball with an 3.4.39 kernel Allwinner throws at manufacturers who want to create H3 devices).

 

Allwinner's 1st BSP kernel variant:

 

Allwinner published 3.4.39 Android kernel sources last year here. All the official OS images for Orange Pis rely on this stuff (still version 3.4.39 and not even a fix for the rootmydevice security issue). This BSP variant also shows somewhat strange throttling settings (not throttling down while still running on all 4 CPU cores but killing CPU cores one after another without bringing them ever back without a reboot). So be prepared that you get horrible performance results with these settings (that explains the horribly low performance scores that are published on phoronix.com for various H3 based Orange Pi boards)

 

Loboris' kernel:

 

The aforementioned kernel sources are basically the stuff Boris Lovosevic (loboris) used to provide the first useable OS images for Orange Pis. He did a really great job fixing tons of issues (eg. enabling GBit Ethernet on OPi Plus or 1-Wire, camera support and so on). Unfortunately he was member of team overclocking so with his so called dvfs settings (dynamic voltage frequency scaling) the Oranges were overvolted (to be able to provide overclocking) and showed all sorts of strange symptoms (insanely high temperatures and stability issues). But this wasn't related to kernel functionality, just settings influencing power supply to the SoC/CPU and enabled overclocking.

 

Yann Dirrson's fork:

 

When we at Armbian started supporting H3 boards we relied on different kernel sources (ssvb, one member of the linux-sunxi community used Allwinner's original BSP sources, patched Mali support in to create a small OS image being able to test DRAM reliability. Another linux-sunxi guy forked this kernel tree and patched in a few more stuff (also some of loboris' great work) so we started using this fork as our basis.

 

1st Armbian legacy kernel:

 

Igor immediately started to patch the horribly outdated 3.4.39 kernel up to the most recent 3.4.y version (3.4.110 back then IIRC) and we threw in a bunch of other patches to improve this and that. Also as the result of still ongoing efforts to maximize performance/throttling settings Armbian shipped with totally different thermal settings which led in the end to pretty good performance of the boards (since we refrained from overvolting and developed sane settings)

 

Alwinner's 2nd BSP kernel variant:

 

When FriendlyARM announced their H3 based NanoPi M1 they also released a newer H3 user manual and also a new BSP kernel variant they obviously both got from Allwinner in the meantime. Jernej maintaining the unofficial H3 OpenELEC fork looked immediately through and spotted a lot of changes. 

 

2nd Armbian legacy kernel:

 

So we (Armbian and jernej/OpenELEC) decided to switch to this newer BSP kernel, Igor cleaned up some stuff and again rebased all patches (up to 3.4.112 IIRC) to the new kernel sources and we adopted all other patches that were still relevant (we could drop a few). This way we could solve the ugly kswapd bug that plagued us before (one CPU core 100% active and eating up memory) and if I understood correctly also some HDMI/display area improved a lot.

 

Currently only Armbian and Jernej's unofficial OpenELEC fork use this kernel with all our many patches on top (maybe a few hundred security relevant and also a lot of functionality improvements): https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/tree/master/patch/kernel/sun8i-default(currently exactly 112 rather large patches that add support for various hardware, new features, many fixes)

 

The SinoVoip experience:

 

While all this happened Foxconn/SinoVoip released their BPi M2+ (a close clone of Orange Pi PC/Plus) and decided to rely on loboris' unmaintained and outdated 3.4.39 kernel for whatever reasons. Since BPi M2+ doesn't use the superiour voltage regulator used on the bigger Oranges at least no overvolting/overclocking is possible here. But for yet unknown reasons this board overheats terribly so we at Armbian adjusted our throttling settings very very low so be prepared that with official SinoVoip OS images strange things might happen when you put some load on this board.

 

Further improvements:

 

In the meantime we further improved thermal/performance behaviour and patched also the kernel so that when the board recovers from heavy overheating killed CPU cores are brought back when temperatures are normal again. In addition to that we provide way more cpufreq steps to allow finetuning throttling behaviour based on environmental conditions (as example: when you're running your device in a small enclosure more throttling will occur and you will benefit from more cpufreq steps in lower regions around 900-1000 MHz. If you go the other route and add a good heatsink and some airflow through a fan Armbian will provide you with a tool able to unlook higher cpufreq steps later this year on supported boards)

 

Summary:

 

Now a short overview about kernel situation combined with thermal/performance settings:

• Official Orange Pi images from Xunlong: 3.4.39, no rootmydevice fix, tons of security fixes missing, performance issues after medium load due to killed CPU cores
• Orange Pi images from loboris: 3.4.39, no rootmydevice fix, tons of security fixes missing, thermal/stability problems due to overvolting, missing sane cpufreq steps (not possible to use 1.3GHz for example)
• Official Banana Pi M2+ images from SinoVoip: 3.4.39, rootmydevice fixed, tons of security fixes missing, performance issues after higher load due to killed CPU cores
• Official NanoPi M1 images from FriendlyARM: 3.4.39, still no rootmydevice fix, tons of security fixes missing, unknown status regarding thermal/performance settings
• Armbian/OpenELEC: 3.4.112, rootmydevice fixed within hours (not an issue on OpenELEC), applied all available fixes from 3.4.y LTS release, constantly improving thermal settings (which means: performance)

[Jaret Burkett]

Thank you for this writeup. I have been gaining a lot of interest in these h3 boards since finding orange pi about a year ago. I learned more in the 5 min reading this that I have over the past year of looking over datasheets and experimenting with the Orange pi boards I have. I am really looking forward to the H3 getting mainlined. 

[tkaiser]

Jean-Luc from cnx-software.com drew a nice table based on the available information: http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/06/08/allwinner-h3-boards-comparison-tables-with-orange-pi-banana-pi-m2-nanopi-p1-and-h3-olinuxino-nano-boards/

[Avinash Ga]

Excellent writeup.

[tkaiser]

Since I listed the history of different BSP kernels and settings a few posts above and have been asked by a fellow what's different between a recent Armbian Xenial desktop build and for example this OS image here based on loboris' build script... I thought: let's give it a try.

 

First big surprise: All the overheating issues we thought would've been resolved are still there in an OS image released a few weeks ago!

 

This image uses the insane overvolting settings from loboris so H3 is all the time fed with at least 1.3V and jumping up to 1.5V (see on the left the Vcore values). This way it's ensured that even when the board is totally idle SoC temperature will be close to 60°C (I've a heatsink applied to my Orange Pi PC Plus I tested with so be prepared that without a heatsink it gets even worse):

 

 

I installed RPi-Monitor and let the thermal fix script do its job to cure the installation:

root@OrangePI:~# wget -q -O - http://kaiser-edv.de/tmp/4U4tkD/install-rpi-monitor-for-h3.sh | /bin/bash
Installing RPi-Monitor. This can take up to 5 minutes. Be patient please [x] done
Checking and installing sunxi-tools if not available [x] done
Patching RPi-Monitor to deal correctly with H3 [x] done

Now you're able to enjoy RPi-Monitor at http://192.168.83.156:8888

root@OrangePI:~# wget -q -O - http://kaiser-edv.de/tmp/H9rWPf/fix-thermal-problems.sh | /bin/bash
Trying to fix thermal settings on this board. This might take a few seconds up to 3 minutes.
Please be patient. Starting now. Done
Successfully repaired broken overvolting/overclocking settings.
Reboot necessary for changes to take effect

root@OrangePI:~# reboot

Afterwards the VDD_CPUX voltage switched fine grained, temperatures looked better but of course this is still far from perfect since in loboris kernel the 1.3 GHz cpufreq step is missing so now with the sane settings maximum cpufreq isn't 1536 MHz but 1200 MHz.

 

I made also quick sysbench runs using 'sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run --num-threads=4' (these are the three temperature peaks you see in the graph above):

• Insane overvolted settings allowing 1536 MHz max: 116.3053 seconds
• After applying thermal fixes allowing 1200 MHz max: 117.9727 seconds
• And finally after rebooting the board into the normal Armbian installation allowing 1296 MHz max: 109.2925 seconds

Since I refrain from using an annoying fan both the insane overvolted settings and the sane known as 'bronco settings' perform identical which is absolutely no surprise since with loboris overvolted settings H3 overheats way too early and therefore throttling is more heavy than with sane settings. Running with Armbian performance increases automagically since we optimized also our kernel settings and allow way more cpufreq steps (interested in details? Then read from here on)

 

I wanted to test other stuff (GPU/X11) but unfortunately loboris kernel not only misses the 113 patches we apply to the newer BSP kernel (just a few hundred security fixes still missing between 3.4.39 and 3.4.112) but also essential USB HID drivers eg. for my Apple keyboard and mouse so I wasn't even able to login. I then thought about replacing the old kernel with our latest Armbian kernel:

 

 

root@OrangePI:~# dpkg -i linux-firmware-image-sun8i_5.14_armhf.deb linux-headers-sun8i_5.14_armhf.deb linux-image-sun8i_5.14_armhf.deb

Selecting previously unselected package linux-firmware-image-sun8i.

(Reading database ... 89737 files and directories currently installed.)

Preparing to unpack linux-firmware-image-sun8i_5.14_armhf.deb ...

Unpacking linux-firmware-image-sun8i (5.14) ...

Selecting previously unselected package linux-headers-sun8i.

Preparing to unpack linux-headers-sun8i_5.14_armhf.deb ...

Unpacking linux-headers-sun8i (5.14) ...

Selecting previously unselected package linux-image-sun8i.

Preparing to unpack linux-image-sun8i_5.14_armhf.deb ...

Unpacking linux-image-sun8i (5.14) ...

Setting up linux-firmware-image-sun8i (5.14) ...

Setting up linux-headers-sun8i (5.14) ...

Compiling headers - please wait ...

Setting up linux-image-sun8i (5.14) ...

update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.4.112-sun8i

root@OrangePI:~# cp -p /media/boot/uImage /media/boot/uImage.bak

root@OrangePI:~# mkimage -A arm -O linux -T kernel -C none -a 0x40008000 -e 0x40008000 -n "Armbian sun8i-3.4.112" -d /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.112-sun8i /media/boot/uImage

Image Name:   Armbian sun8i-3.4.112

Created:      Sun Jun 12 12:51:57 2016

Image Type:   ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)

Data Size:    5064800 Bytes = 4946.09 kB = 4.83 MB

Load Address: 40008000

Entry Point:  40008000

 

 

 

But to no avail since after converting our kernel image to the uImage the outdated u-boot on all the older OS images expects I rebooted and our kernel paniced since I failed to provide a way to look for the rootfs: http://pastebin.com/ehyk1XhQ

 

Anyway: I won't waste any more time with this since it's just crazy to use an image based on a horribly outdated 3.4.39 kernel lacking so much fixes and features. I could confirm that the most recent version of the GC2035 camera driver we included in Armbian yesterday is way better than the one included in this/loboris image, that thermal/performance settings still suck, no support for Wi-Fi on the new Oranges there, no access to eMMC (though it should work with loboris install_to_emmc script but I haven't tested since I don't want to wipe out my nice Armbian installation on eMMC) and so on.

 

Since I also don't know which real world applications make use of OpenGL ES (apart from irrelevant benchmarks and some games where it seems to be confirmed that Armbian's switch to the new BSP kernel and clocking Mali 400 with 600 MHz increases performance by 30%) I saw also no need to further waste time with testing other images. But as usual: YMMV

[Lope]

@Tkaiser: Thank you so much for this excellent writeup!
I've been away from the forums for a while, and now my OPi One arrived yesterday.

 

Slow shipping to Malaysia, tracking disappeared for 51 days, then IT ARRIVED!   
I shipped it to Malaysia from Aliexpress. The tracking number worked while it was in China, but once it left China, it did not appear on the Malaysian postal tracking site until 51 days after it left China.

During the 51 days, the Malaysian post office told me it was not on their system. Steven was helpful, always replied quickly and offered to refund me, but I said I was willing to wait.

I've bought other items from Aliexpress and not had that problem before. Other packages came quickly and were trackable in Malaysia as soon as they left China.
 

How to test Orange Pi board

1. What build/kernel should I run to test my board? I'm guessing this one? http://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-one/ (kernel 3.4.y)

2. What software to run to test it? I found this post you made about testing Orange Pi boards it's quite long and detailed and I don't have time to get deep into anything, I just need to do a quick test?

 

It's great that you've put all of this information about the different boards up on this post, as well as the kernel development progress.

 

This helps a lot, but I think we can improve the situation even more.

 

Improving H3 user friendliness, increasing adoption and development

 

I think there should be 3 pinned threads on this H3 forum.
* H3 Board buyers guide
* H3 What build/kernel to run
* H3 How to test your board

This is a simple 1,2,3 step process. First you choose what board to buy. Then you choose what software to run on it. Then you test it and send it back if there's a problem while your board is covered by buyer protection.

I think this will improve the whole situation regarding H3 boards. Currently RbPi is dominating because they provide all of the above. People know what board to buy. They know what software to run, and get the latest working software. And the boards are well tested so there is peace of mind. If we can level up with H3 by providing the above threads, we should be able to improve adoption and quality. We don't want to see SBC's dominated by the RbPi foundation only. We want a wide selection of good quality low cost boards that are stable. With good adoption we'll have great community contributions, quicker mainline support, and even get stuff like KVM running on our H3's.
For these pinned posts I think we need to keep them as short as possible. For example in this post above, you've outlined a fairly comprehensive history of H3 kernel development, and on the testing page above you also went into a lot of details about the history of testing and discussion of it etc.

If we want to increase adoption and testing of these boards, I think we need to provide 2 levels for user interaction.

Level 1: Tell the user the best boards to buy, the best software to run and give one command to test their board and share the results automatically.

Level 2: Here's the source code and the whole discussion and history of everything.

 

Comparing again to RbPi. This is the user experience at the RbPi site:
1. Someone goes to their site and sees a comparison of what boards to buy.
2. They choose one of the recommended software builds.

3. Testing not really required.

For each of these 3 steps the interface is very clean, there is not much to read or decide. People can get a RbPi and be productive with it very quickly. I think this is what we should aim for. Supporting mass adoption.

 

I can definitely help with this. I will have more time a month from now.

 

Tkaiser, you probably know best about what's going on with the mainline kernel on H3...

I've searched from time to time and in past discussions with you I've seen that a few people are running a more modern kernel, (version >=4) and there has been some success getting ethernet working on the Orange H3 boards with the mainline kernel (not sure if it's fast ethernet, gigabit ethernet or both)

I would like to participate in testing and maybe some development of Mainline kernel on Orange Pi one. (that's what I have now, but I'm also interested in the 2E)

Where is the latest mainline kernel development taking place? Where can a build be downloaded and tested?

Is it OpenElec? :
http://www.orangepi.org/orangepibbsen/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=648

https://github.com/jernejsk/OpenELEC-OPi2

[tkaiser]

H2+/H3/H5 boards overview (2017/03 update)

 

Since it has been a while since this topic has been updated and a lot of new boards have been released in the meantime it's time for a new overview.

 

I'll add also H2+ and H5 based boards since in the meantime we learned that those SoCs are pin-to-pin compatible and recently vendors started to simply exchange H3 with H5 on some PCB (and vice versa in at least one occurence). From a software point of view H5 is quite different (using 64-bit Cortex-A53 CPU cores and ARMv8 instruction set, some early boot stages are also totally different compared to Cortex-A7/ARMv7 used in H3 and H2+) and it should also be noted that Armbian currently only provides OS images based on mainline kernel for H5 boards (so please forget about HW accelerated video decoding or 3D for now or maybe ever since none of the developers is in the mood to deal with Allwinner's BSP/legacy kernel for H5 (regarding 'BSP' just look above in post #2).

 

While software support for H5 is currently somewhat different hardware features are pretty much the same as with H3 (still 3 to 4 real USB2 host ports and one USB2 OTG port: a simple register setting can switch the Micro USB port's PHY between the so called 'musb' controller used for OTG and a real EHCI/OHCI controller pair: with mainline kernel it will soon be possible to switch OTG to a real 4th USB2 host port with full feature set that still has not to share bandwidth with any of the other USB ports).

 

CPU performance with H5 compared to H3 is slightly higher at the same clockspeed but some workloads that benefit from either 64-bit or ARMv8 instruction set are significantly faster (eg. software making use of NEON instructions might perform almost twice as fast and the best example is the stupid 'sysbench' CPU pseudo benchmark which shows over 10 times better scores on the same hardware when compiled with ARMv8 settings).

 

In the following list I will also introduce some subjective 'categories' to deal better with the huge amount of boards we can use in the meantime:

• NAS category: these are the H3/H5 boards with Gigabit Ethernet
• IoT category: these are the small and cheap boards best suited for low consumption
• 'General purpose' category: all the other H3 devices, these are also those you should look for if you want a cheap device to run with X11, OpenELEC, RetrOrangePi or Lakka since they all feature HDMI and full legacy kernel support

As already said the differentiation is subjective and partially misleading since new boards like NanoPi NEO 2 featuring Gigabit Ethernet are also that inexpensive, small and energy efficient that they could serve both as NAS and IoT nodes (actually you can somewhat control behaviour since GbE vs. Fast Ethernet makes a pretty huge difference in consumption so it's up to you). Boards that might fit in multiple categories are listed more than once to make comparisons more simple if you're only interested in a specific device category:

 

NAS category (only due to Gigabit Ethernet available):

• Banana Pi M2+: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT
• Banana Pi M2+ EDU: H3, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+2 USB ports useable
• NanoPi M1 Plus: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT
• NanoPi M1 Plus 2: H5, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT
• NanoPi NEO 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable
• NanoPi NEO Plus 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+2+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi
• OrangePi PC 2: H5, 1GB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable
• OrangePi PC Prime: H5, 2GB DRAM, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT
• OrangePi Plus: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB eMMC, 1+4 USB ports useable (hub), Wi-Fi
• OrangePi Plus 2: H3, 2GB DRAM, 16GB fast eMMC, 1+4 USB ports useable (hub), Wi-Fi
• OrangePi Plus 2E: H3, 2GB DRAM, 16GB fast eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi

IoT category (cheap, small, energy efficient, most of them headless):

• NanoPi Air: H3, 512MB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet
• NanoPi NEO: H3, 256/512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet
• NanoPi NEO 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Gigabit Ethernet
• NanoPi NEO Plus 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet
• OrangePi Zero: H2+, 256/512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet
• OrangePi Zero Plus 2: H3, 512MB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+0+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet but HDMI
• OrangePi Zero Plus 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+0+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet but HDMI

General purpose (HDMI and full legacy kernel support: video/3D HW accelerated):

• Beelink X2: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+1 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet
• NanoPi M1: H3, 1GB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet
• OrangePi Lite: H3, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, no Ethernet
• OrangePi One: H3, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet
• OrangePi PC: H3, 1GB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet
• OrangePi PC Plus: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet
• OrangePi Zero Plus 2: H3, 512MB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet
• pcDuino Nano 4: See above, it's just an OEM version of NanoPi M1 done for Linksprite

Some important notes:

• The following boards are listed in more than 1 category due to advanced feature mix: NanoPi NEO 2, NanoPi NEO Plus 2 and OrangePi Zero Plus 2 H3/H5
• CE/FCC certifications: Please check individually and don't trust in logos silkscreened on the PCB, even if it looks like 'CE' it might mean 'China Export' instead
• IO bandwidth: H2+/H3/H5 SoC features 3+1 USB2 ports but on a few boards an internal USB hub is used so while these expose more USB receptacles some ports have to share bandwidth. Also on these boards a buggy/slow GL830 USB-to-SATA bridge is used. Search for 'hub' above to identify them.
• eMMC: shows most of the times higher random IO performance compared to 'the average SD card', but some vendors use pretty slow eMMC on their boards (Xunlong being the exception with OPi PC Plus, Plus, Plus 2, Plus 2E and Zero Plus 2). Please do not overestimate eMMC -- there's no need to choose crappy/slow SD cards and if you follow the usual recommendations difference in performance varies not that much (for example eMMC on most boards shows pretty low sequential write speeds that will be easily outperformed by any good SD card and differences in random IO don't have to be that huge, simply watch out for SD cards showing A1 or even A2 logo)
• USB ports: Some of the IoT devices have two of the SoC's USB host ports available on a pin header to be used with soldering or combined with various Docks, HATs or 'Expansion boards' (search for '1+1+2' above). On OPi One/Lite the unexposed USB host ports are available at pretty tiny solder pads so only usable with a lot of soldering experience
• Wi-Fi/BT: all boards providing both Wi-Fi and BT rely on Ampak's AP6212 so performance is identical, the Wi-Fi only boards either rely on RTL8189ETV/8189FTV (slightly better Wi-Fi performance than AP6212) or Allwinner's XR819 (so expect low Wi-Fi performance with OPi Zero or NEO Plus 2 since implementation is low-end and currently driver sucks)
• Yeah, each vendor's naming scheme totally sucks. Partially there are rules involved (the 'Plus' then means eMMC with Xunlong or GBit Ethernet with FriendlyELEC... mostly) but please don't trust in and check always individually!

 

And now another few words on a different technical detail affecting both performance and thermal behaviour of the various boards: Voltage regulation / DVFS. TL;DR: the SoC can be fed with a variable voltage (VDD_CPUX), the lower the voltage the lower the temperature (less problems with heat/overheating), the higher the voltage the higher the maximum CPU clockspeed. So the best idea is to adjust this dynamically (low voltage/clockspeed when idle and only increasing both when needed). There are 3 variants to implement this: not at all, primitive or advanced (using a voltage regulator that's able to adjust VDD_CPUX in 20mV steps)

• Only 3 devices implement no voltage regulation at all: Banana Pi M2+/EDU (frying the SoC constantly at 1.3V therefore prone to overheating), Beelink X2 (no idea) and NEO 2 (only 1.1V therefore limited to 1008MHz cpufreq max since above instabilities might occur). 
• Some boards use SY8106A I2C accessible voltage regulator where we can use fine grained voltage settings (Armbian fine-tuned these for every board so far to achieve max performance). This applies only to the following Xunlong boards: OPi PC, PC Plus, PC 2, PC 3, Plus, Plus 2 and Plus 2E.
• All other boards implement a simple two voltage scheme and are able to switch between 1.1V (up to 912MHz possible with H2+/H3 or 1008MHz with H5) or 1.3V (1.2GHz max with H2+/H3 and 1.25GHz with H5)

And finally to add some stupid rankings: the cheapest board is from Xunlong (Orange Pi Zero: $7), the fastest is from Xunlong (Orange Pi PC 2 for $20) and the one with best feature set and onboard peripherals is also from Xunlong (Orange Pi Plus 2E: $35). And that's only due to OrangePi PC 3 Prime still not being released at the time of this writing (since otherwise regarding both performance and features this specific Xunlong board... )

 

Hope that helps

 

Edit: OPi 3 is now known as OPi Prime and (almost) nothing has changed compared to the leaked pictures back from last August.

 

[PaddleStroke]

Hey guys,

 

Thank you tkaiser for this write up!

 

I am starting to design a PCB based on H3 or H2+ that is intended to run on battery. I started with H3-Olinuxino design files.

 

I did not find many data about power managment on H3 boards (only that H3 does not support PM). The C.H.I.P based on a R8 SoC use a AXP209. Do you have any hints on what PM IC to use? My best choice right now is to make a power-managment design separated from H3 and that will just have an ON/OFF switch to supply the rest of the PCB. Which will not enable to have safe shutdown.

Also do you have some hardware advices to reduce power consumptions? I read that reducing DDR voltage from 1.5V to 1.35V will help reduce overheating and power consumption.

 

Also from your experience with H3 boards what would be good hardware design practices to reduce over-heating of the SoC? About the orange pi copper layer to spread the heat do you have more data on this? Does he use ground planes on the different layers on does he have a dedicated layer with special copper thickness? 

 

If you have any hardware design advices it would be great!

 

[zador.blood.stained]

21 minutes ago, PaddleStroke said:

I did not find many data about power managment on H3 boards (only that H3 does not support PM).

Well, H3 reference design and board support package don't include PMIC support, but you can always add one if you are not fully relying on preexisting designs and software packages.

 

22 minutes ago, PaddleStroke said:

Do you have any hints on what PM IC to use?

AXP209 will be a good choice because of software support compared to other AXPs, especially if targeting mainline kernel.

 

19 minutes ago, PaddleStroke said:

My best choice right now is to make a power-managment design separated from H3 and that will just have an ON/OFF switch to supply the rest of the PCB. Which will not enable to have safe shutdown.

You can always add GPIO controlled regulators for other peripherials on the PCB, and AXP209 has a special output (EXTEN) for enabling/disabling external regulators on startup/shutdown.

 

27 minutes ago, PaddleStroke said:

I read that reducing DDR voltage from 1.5V to 1.35V will help reduce overheating and power consumption.

Using LPDDR3 may help even more with DRAM power consumption, but software support for this DRAM type will be the main problem.

[tkaiser]

H2+/H3/H5 boards overview (early 2018 update)

 

For the methodology/categorization please see above. This is just a brief overview adding the boards that appeared within the last few months (Banana Pi Zero, NanoPi Duo, Orange Pi R1, Orange Pi Zero Plus, Sunvell R69) and will appear soon or are just released (ACT Power X-A1, Libre Computer's H2+/H3/H5 Tritium, NanoPi NEO Core and Core2):

 

NAS category (only due to Gigabit Ethernet available):

• Banana Pi M2+: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT
• Banana Pi M2+ EDU: H3, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+2 USB ports useable
• NanoPi M1 Plus: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT
• NanoPi M1 Plus 2: H5, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT
• NanoPi NEO 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable
• NanoPi NEO Core 2: H5, 512MB/1GB DRAM, eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, GbE on pin header
• NanoPi NEO Plus 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+2+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi
• OrangePi PC 2: H5, 1GB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable
• OrangePi Prime: H5, 2GB DRAM, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT
• OrangePi Plus: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB eMMC, 1+4 USB ports useable (hub), Wi-Fi
• OrangePi Plus 2: H3, 2GB DRAM, 16GB slow eMMC, 1+4 USB ports useable (hub), Wi-Fi
• OrangePi Plus 2E: H3, 2GB DRAM, 16GB fast eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi
• Orange Pi Zero Plus: H5, 512MB, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi
• X-A1: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB eMMC, 1+2 USB ports useable

IoT category (cheap, small, energy efficient, most of them headless):

• Banana Pi Zero: H2+, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1 USB port useable, Wi-Fi/BT,  Fast Ethernet (pin header)
• NanoPi Air: H3, 512MB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet
• NanoPi Duo, H2+, 256/512MB DRAM, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet (pin header)
• NanoPi NEO: H3, 256/512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet
• NanoPi NEO 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Gigabit Ethernet

• NanoPi NEO Core: H3, 256/512MB DRAM, optional eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet (pin header)

• NanoPi NEO Plus 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet
• Orange Pi R1: H2+, 256MB DRAM, 1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, 2 x Fast Ethernet (1 x USB RTL8152)
• OrangePi Zero: H2+, 256/512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet
• OrangePi Zero Plus 2: H3, 512MB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+0+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet but HDMI
• OrangePi Zero Plus 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+0+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet but HDMI

• Tritium IoT: H2+, 512MB DRAM, 1+3 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet

General purpose (HDMI and full legacy kernel support: video/3D HW accelerated):

• Beelink X2: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+1 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet
• NanoPi M1: H3, 1GB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet
• OrangePi Lite: H3, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, no Ethernet
• OrangePi One: H3, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet
• OrangePi PC: H3, 1GB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet
• OrangePi PC Plus: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet
• OrangePi Zero Plus 2: H3, 512MB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet
• pcDuino Nano 4: See above, it's just an OEM version of NanoPi M1 done for Linksprite
• Sunvell R69, H2+, 1GB DRAM, 8GB eMMC, 1+1 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet
• Tritium: H3, 1GB DRAM, 1+3 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet
• Tritium: H5, 2GB DRAM, 1+3 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet