Armbian on a Raspberry Pi3?

[dennisv]

I'm currently running Armbian Ubuntu Xenial Server on a Cubietruck, it works very well, thanks for all the effort!

 

I recently bought a Raspberry Pi 3, installed some of the available images and found them kind of disappointing.

 

The RPI2 and RPI3 both support ARMv7, which should make it reasonably easy to run Armbian Ubuntu images on it. Any chance of getting RPI2/3 support in the future? I would be willing to test work.

 

Thanks!

[tkaiser]

At least I prefer to work on supporting interesting hardware which RPi 3 is clearly not. For me personally the various Raspberries have one single feature: That's the ability to use HW accelerated video encoding (identical on all RPi models since the job is done on the VideoCore IV and not the ARM cores) but fortunately we can now also use Allwinner boards (see github repos of community member @lex and various threads in H3 and free forum).

 

From a user's point of view the only great thing about Rasperries is the huge community, this advantage would be lost by switching to Armbian. So supporting these overpriced pieces of hardware really makes not that much sense IMO

 

The proprietary boot process and the ARM cores not being first class citizens (the CPU cores do not even know at which frequency they're clocked and information like /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq is cheating on you) also make working with this platform less fun. Also Armbian is a lot about pushing the envelope (optimize settings, tweak kernel and u-boot) which is simply not possible on Raspberries since a lot of this stuff happens inside the properietary so called 'Firmware'. Armbian would just be another lame rootfs on these devices.

 

BTW: For my use cases I/O and network bandwidth is somewhat important and here even the cheapest devices Armbian currently supports (NanoPi NEO and soon Orange Pi Zero) easily outperform RPi 3.

[dennisv]

Thanks for the swift reply!

 

Makes sense. It's too bad that the Raspberry got so hugely popular and not some other more interesting board... perhaps the only thing we can thank the Raspberry for is getting many people interested in single board computers 

 

I found the original Pi very disappointing, it's terribly slow! The Pi2 was a bit better but still quite disappointing. The Pi3 is slightly better though. I did a bit of benchmarking, in general it seems to be a bit faster than the clock speed increase. One particular thing that caught my attention is that it's much faster at encryption than the Pi2, about 3.5 times faster for AES if I remember well. Desktop performance also feels more snappy. But yes, there are plenty of other boards that outperform it at a lower price.

 

BTW: For my use cases I/O and network bandwidth is somewhat important and here even the cheapest devices Armbian currently supports (NanoPi NEO and soon Orange Pi Zero) easily outperform RPi 3.

 

This is exactly why I got a Cubietruck several years ago, before that a Cubox Pro. Both with native SATA and GBit ethernet. Most SBC's only have USB2 and no SATA or SATA through a crappy USB bridge. It's difficult to find a replacement for it! Any recommendations?

 

I hooked up an ASIX AX88179 USB gbit ethernet to the RPI3 just for the fun of it, as expected it's barely faster than the built-in 100mbit when serving out files from a USB disk. The best use case for the RPI3 seems to be LibreELEC, but I already have a Minix NEO X7 for that