Kernel dev (4.9) - which board runs reasonably well - Orange PI One , NanoPI Neo or something else ?

gahabana · November 15, 2016

hi all,

would love to run 'mainline' kernel on some of the boards. Armbian does provide 'choice' today for most/many Orange boards as well as NanoPI ... tu build the image with mainline/4.9 kernel. my needs are not too complex

a) Ethernet

USB to drive USB DAC

...

Is there anyone on a forum who has tried recent 4.9-rc or maybe even 4.8 and it worked well and if yes which boards did you use ?

I am running Odroid-C2 happily with Armbian and 3.14.79 kernel but some of the very old bugs have been fixed later on (kernel bugs) and am looking for a board that might run recent kernel well (enough).

Thank you !

bzfrp · November 17, 2016

Hi,

What is your project ? An audio streamer ?

I have a NanoPi NEO. I tried kernel 4.7.6 and 4.8.3 (using armbian build tools), all worked very well.

gahabana · November 17, 2016

hi @bzfrp,

yes, audio streamer (squeezelite and roon) - that is great news - have ordered NanoPI NEO and am looking forward !!!

Have Odroid-C2 which i liked cause it was running 64bit linux and it does work well with Squeezelite and also runs Roon endpoint (though had to isntall 32bit libraries as it's armv7 32-bit binary) and it does work well ... but every now and then i get some warnings in kernel log (which have no impact on operations, but i get annoyed). So i thought more updated kernel on a board would do just fine.

Btw, Odroid-c2 can manage running squeezelite to resample/upsample all the content to either 192khz or 176.4khz from any sample rate (incuding DSD) ... it does peak to 100% CPU utilitsation with DSD64 material but no dropouts or any issues.

NanopI Neo might not be too far from that - will share once i get it and install everything.

As for Roon or non-resampling squeezelite - all CPUs today on all boards are way more then capable of being audio streamers

thank you !!!

gahabana · December 17, 2016

hi all, @bzrfp,

finally got last weekend NanoPi NEO.

Went to my Armbian directory, fired it up, said i'd like Ubuntu Xenial with devt kernel console and 20 mins later i had the image. I have customized image build for my odroid-c2 (added squeezelite package to lib.config file under userpatches directory and i added roon endpoint install script (slightly modified)) to avoid having to type couple of commands into produced image once its made.

So my Armbian build process is really plain Armbian build plus install of squeezelite (for LMS server) and Roon Endpoint.

Anyhow, burnt the image, tested it - rebooted, put in a case,connected usb dac and ethernet again and it's been working for a week with 0 hicups. Both as squeezelite player and roon endpoint. boots in less then 20 seconds ... but as i said did it only twice week ago

I do have CPU cooler that i ordered with NanoPI NEO ... the ONLY change i made was put CPU in performance mode running at 1.2 GHz. .... worked well with less then 1Ghz as well ... Roon needs no CPU really (i can only test up to 192khz/24bit with my Benchmark DAC2) and squeezelite has no trouble with even converting DSD64 stream to PCM 192khz ... CPU utilisation in one of the cores jumps to 100% for a while but there are no dropouts.

I do have Intona USB Isolator connected after it (its about 10 times bigger then NanoPI itself but i hear no major difference (nothing bad) compared to OdroidC2 nor the PC i used to have before as endpoint.

for 15$ doesnt get much better

Thanks to Armbian guys this is really easy !!!!!!!

bzfrp · December 22, 2016

I do have CPU cooler that i ordered with NanoPI NEO ... the ONLY change i made was put CPU in performance mode running at 1.2 GHz. ....

On my NanoPi NEO UPnP player using upmpdcli/mpd, I tested schedutil. It is not suitable for 24/96 hd files.

I have disabled cpu-freq in the kernel config, and now I am testing ondemand. It seems to work better than schedutil, but I think I'll back to cpu-freq disabled.