SBC-Fan Posted May 4, 2020 Posted May 4, 2020 (edited) Hello Opi Community, I have an Orange Pi PC with the below HW Specs: Snippet of lshw output: description: ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l) product: Xunlong Orange Pi PC width: 32 bits capabilities: smp 4 CPU Issue: Chromium locks up frequently while browsing the internet. Yes I'm running the ARMBIAN OS (Armbian Buster) Chromium Version 76.0.3809.100 (Developer Build) built on Debian 10.0, running on Debian 10.1 (32-bit) Not sure if it is an H2 or H3 board. How do I find it? It is an AllWinner Sun8i family H3 Board armbian-firmware 20.02.4 ArmbianMonitor dump is here: http://ix.io/2kMo I would like to know if I can upgrade the RAM from 1 GB to 2GB ? If yes which RAM chip do I purchase? I have a soldering kit with me to replace the RAM chip. Bonus Question: Not sure if the issue is with chromium itself, if anyone has experienced this, is there an alternate browser? Regards, OPi user Edited May 4, 2020 by orangepie14 Firmware version and Armbianmonitor dump
Igor Posted May 4, 2020 Posted May 4, 2020 24 minutes ago, orangepie14 said: Hello Opi Community This is not Opi community. This is Armbian community, welcome. Find your board here https://www.armbian.com/download/, download and install Armbian. In case of troubles, read documentation, read forum ... and if nothing helps, ask a question.
SBC-Fan Posted May 4, 2020 Author Posted May 4, 2020 (edited) I have edited my original post. Edited May 4, 2020 by orangepie14
Werner Posted May 4, 2020 Posted May 4, 2020 Providing armbianmonitor -u is a very good start go get a chance receiving support. It is always handy to know what you are dealing with, right? SBCs usually are not meant to be "upgraded" like your intel architecture desktop pc or laptop. And I guess you'd have a tough time replacing it. No idea which ram to use though. Quote Not sure if the issue is with chromium itself, if anyone has experienced this, is there an alternate browser? Sure there are. Most commonly used probably Firefox. Opera is also available for Linux but no idea if they have armhf packages.
martinayotte Posted May 4, 2020 Posted May 4, 2020 3 hours ago, orangepie14 said: I would like to know if I can upgrade the RAM from 1 GB to 2GB ? The PCB routing doesn't provide the extra address line to allow upgrading RAM ...
SBC-Fan Posted May 4, 2020 Author Posted May 4, 2020 (edited) Quote Providing armbianmonitor -u is a very good start go get a chance receiving support. It is always handy to know what ou are dealing with, right? Thank you for the reply. My main query is hardware related as I have noticed that the ARM CPU performance is not great while running multiple applications or content. For example if I open multiple tabs (2-3) on chromium which has different web content such as video and images - the browser just locks up. When I open Chromium with a blank tab, the CPU usage sometimes goes to 100% which prompted me to ask a question about the bulky browser. I'm well aware that this is an Armbian discussion forum, hence I browsed to find the right thread to post my hardware query. Not sure why the other poster, Igor, was nitpicking my post. The reason I mentioned OPi community is because there are many Orange Pi users who post on these forums, hence I was trying to gain their attention as Orange Pi doesn't offer much support. I have installed Armbian Buster, but I'm not aware of any Armbian specific commands, as I mostly use Debian commands. I have used the armbian-config utility, but I was unable to find any other Armbian specific commands in the documentation. I found your commands here: https://docs.armbian.com/Hardware_Allwinner-H3/ Quote SBCs usually are not meant to be "upgraded" like your intel architecture desktop pc or laptop. And I guess you'd have a tough time replacing it. No idea which ram to use though. Yes, maybe time for me to buy a new one. The ARM technology is advancing very rapidly and maybe will replace the intel architecture in a few years. Gone will be the days of desktop and laptops running on intel processors. Unfortunately, I bought an ARM with just 1 GB RAM, but I bought this as a replacement for my old laptop which I sold during a crisis. I did browse the forums before posting and found that one of the users had successfully replaced the RAM chip: Edited May 4, 2020 by orangepie14
Werner Posted May 4, 2020 Posted May 4, 2020 Quote My main query is hardware related Still outdated firmware/software can be an issue and with the provided information this can be sorted out quickly. That is why support requests without these informations are usually discarded. Quote Not sure why the other poster, Igor, was nitpicking my post. Igor has quite a bunch of reasons to do so but this would go way too much into off-topic Quote but I'm not aware of any Armbian specific commands, Besides armbian-config and armbianmonitor (and maybe nand-sata-install) there aren't more. Armbian basically combines a custom kernel for various SBCs with a Debian-based distro which is only minimally tweaked to provide a mostly original behaviour. You don't have to use the config tool. I do not use it much myself. It is just a collection of some stuff that is handy from time to time. Considering the price point of these boards I am not sure if it is worth the effort even thinking about doing any surgeries on such boards.
SBC-Fan Posted May 4, 2020 Author Posted May 4, 2020 18 minutes ago, martinayotte said: The PCB routing doesn't provide the extra address line to allow upgrading RAM ... Thank you for your reply. I did read your reply on the other thread, but was unable to understand the logic of extra address lines. My ARM board uses 32 bit addressing, and not sure what is the RAM limit. My logic of upgrading the RAM is to avoid the over utilization, which leads to overheating and locking up. If I use 2 GB RAM instead of 1 GB, would this not allow me to run more applications? I mean the Orange Pi PC 2 has H3 Board with 2 GB RAM, so I suspect there is not much of a difference between Orange Pi PC and Orange Pi PC 2. If I can purchase the RAM chip of an Orange Pi PC 2 and solder it on to an Orange Pi PC - it should work right? From an OS standpoint, I have tried increasing the swap, but that has not helped improve the performance. root@orangepipc:/home/orangepi# swapon -s Filename Type Size Used Priority /swapfile file 2097148 312088 -2 /dev/zram1 partition 495296 281412 5
Werner Posted May 4, 2020 Posted May 4, 2020 Quote From an OS standpoint, I have tried increasing the swap, but that has not helped improve the performance. This probably made the performance even worse because an SD card is WAY slower than any harddrive or SSD and read/write will take forever. Armbian already includes improvements in this direction by providing zram.
SBC-Fan Posted May 4, 2020 Author Posted May 4, 2020 18 minutes ago, Werner said: Still outdated firmware/software can be an issue and with the provided information this can be sorted out quickly. That is why support requests without these informations are usually discarded. I have updated the firmware version in my original post: It is an AllWinner Sun8i family H3 Board armbian-firmware 20.02.4 ArmbianMonitor dump is here: http://ix.io/2kMo Quote Considering the price point of these boards I am not sure if it is worth the effort even thinking about doing any surgeries on such boards. I have the tools and time, besides I don't feel like buying a new board now. I can find the spare part online, the only confirmation I need is that it will work.
martinayotte Posted May 4, 2020 Posted May 4, 2020 20 minutes ago, orangepie14 said: I mean the Orange Pi PC 2 has H3 Board with 2 GB RAM, so I suspect there is not much of a difference between Orange Pi PC and Orange Pi PC 2. If I can purchase the RAM chip of an Orange Pi PC 2 and solder it on to an Orange Pi PC - it should work right? The RAM chip needs an additional address line from the H3 SoC to decide if it is addressing the upper or lower bank of the memory. If the OPiPC PCB was designed in function to use 1GB, and didn't provided this additional address line to be compatible with 2GB chips, then this line will be left floating on the chip and can even not be limited to the first 1GB bank, but can even give random memory data depending of if the floating line will be treat as LOW or HIGH depending of the EFI, it will return the wrong data.
guidol Posted May 4, 2020 Posted May 4, 2020 6 hours ago, orangepie14 said: I mean the Orange Pi PC 2 has H3 Board with 2 GB RAM, so I suspect there is not much of a difference between Orange Pi PC and Orange Pi PC 2. The Orange Pi PC2 has a H5 CPU (64bit) . also with 1GB of Ram (not 2GB ): http://www.orangepi.org/orangepipc2/ The Orange Pi PC has a H3 CPU (32bit) with 1GB of Ram : http://www.orangepi.org/orangepipc/ The OPi PC with H3 can run also H3Droid ( https://h3droid.com/ ) - which I do use here as Voice/TTS Server
SBC-Fan Posted May 4, 2020 Author Posted May 4, 2020 (edited) 56 minutes ago, martinayotte said: The RAM chip needs an additional address line from the H3 SoC to decide if it is addressing the upper or lower bank of the memory. If the OPiPC PCB was designed in function to use 1GB, and didn't provided this additional address line to be compatible with 2GB chips, then this line will be left floating on the chip and can even not be limited to the first 1GB bank, but can even give random memory data depending of if the floating line will be treat as LOW or HIGH depending of the EFI, it will return the wrong data. Now I get it! Thank you for explaining. I reviewed the AllWinner H3 datasheet to find some information about the memory architecture and addressing, but was unable to find any accurate information. I found some generic information here: (Page 28-29) https://s2.smu.edu/~dhoungninou/CSE-EE-5-7385/slides/week14/memsys.pdf Is there any website out there where we can check the spare part compatibility for micro-controllers? Edited May 4, 2020 by orangepie14
SBC-Fan Posted May 4, 2020 Author Posted May 4, 2020 41 minutes ago, guidol said: The Orange Pi PC2 has a H5 CPU (64bit) . also with 1GB of Ram (not 2GB ): http://www.orangepi.org/orangepipc2/ The Orange Pi PC has a H3 CPU (32bit) with 1GB of Ram : http://www.orangepi.org/orangepipc/ The OPi PC with H3 can run also H3Droid - which I do use here as Voice/TTS Server You are correct. My mistake, I meant Orange Pi Plus 2 http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiplus2/
Igor Posted May 4, 2020 Posted May 4, 2020 Since people already explained you that memory upgrade is no go ... I can suggest you Orangepi 3 with 2Gb memory or better, some RK3399 with 4Gb. Or some Amlogic with 4Gb. You don't need to tweak the system in any way to squeeze out more. Armbian is not Debian in this sense, we did that for you. It was pushed to the limits of the hardware long time ago.
SBC-Fan Posted May 4, 2020 Author Posted May 4, 2020 1 hour ago, guidol said: The OPi PC with H3 can run also H3Droid - which I do use here as Voice/TTS Server Thank you for letting me know about the H3 Droid OS. Much appreciated.
SBC-Fan Posted May 4, 2020 Author Posted May 4, 2020 33 minutes ago, Igor said: Since people already explained you that memory upgrade is no go ... I can suggest you Orangepi 3 with 2Gb memory or better, some RK3399 with 4Gb. Or some Amlogic with 4Gb. You don't need to tweak the system in any way to squeeze out more. Armbian is not Debian in this sense, we did that for you. It was pushed to the limits of the hardware long time ago. The positive takeaway from the discussion is that, performance is not only about the RAM, but also the CPU. I still suspect that Chromium browser could be the culprit, but that is another topic. After some research I found that the newer version(v8) of ARM processors support SMT (Simultaneous multi-thread) processing per core. The version 7 has only single thread processing per core, which could be a cause of freezing Chromium. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/18/arm_cortex_a65ae/
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