What's experimental with mainline kernel with Nano NEO Air?

[stasiana]

Hi everyone. I heard Armbian was the to-go distribution for the Nanopi NEO Air. I've got a bunch of these boards where I'd like to use the built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capability in a small form factor for a project. I don't need video or audio or other functionality.

 

I see a legacy kernel "stable build" and a mainline kernel "experimental" build. For the experimental build it lists the following known problems:

 

• No Mali drivers
• No hardware accelerated video decoding
• schedutil CPU governor may cause clicks and pops on audio output – change(d) to ondemand to work around this issue

 

This sounds fine with me. I need no video, and no audio.

 

I also see from the documentation:

 

Quote

 

Due to H3’s overheating tendencies a working throttling implementation is important when more heavy workloads should run on the board. This is implemented in legacy kernel (settings have been improved a lot by linux-sunxi community and us compared to Allwinner’s defaults), but in mainline kernel it is still Work-in-Progress which is one of the reasons that prevent us from releasing Armbian images with mainline kernel.

 

Is this still currently the case? Would using mainline kernel potentially overheat the board if there is a processing load on it?

 

Lastly, what else about this experimental mainline kernel board for the Nanopi NEO Air should I be keeping in mind in case it's not well-documented but known to people using this board that might be relevant to me?

 

 

 

 

[zador.blood.stained]

Current status of mainline kernel and u-boot on H3 boards (kernel branch orange-pi-4.11 and u-boot version v2017.05)

• Not all boards are supported and patches for some boards even were not published yet. That means that future upgrades may temporary break some functionality or may break the system completely (i.e. if Device Tree file names change)
• Ethernet driver branch that is being used in unsupported/obsolete. This means if there are any issues there are no maintainers that can investigate and fix these issues (and there was a serious issue with the previous Ethernet driver version that was fixed only ~2-3 weeks ago)
• DVFS and THS are WIP. These means they are not enabled on all boards and future upgrades may temporarily break these features even where they are currently working. Operating points may change too, but it's not an issue to be concerned about.
• Display - only simplefb is available (which means no Mali driver, no DPMS), also custom resolution and overscan parameters (for HDMI) can't be set.
• Obviously no HW video decoding
• USB OTG probably doesn't work as it will be officially added only in 4.12

 

Regarding Neo Air:

• This board will be officially added only in kernel 4.12, and currently it uses DT for the NanoPi Neo with some patches on top. This means that Air specific functionality (wireless and eMMC) may break with update to kernel 4.12.
• No idea if Bluetooth works out of the box. Most likely not.
• DVFS and THS are enabled for this board, so overheating should not be a problem. But for these small boards using a heatsink is highly recommended.

 

so TL; DR - mainlie based images can be used, but please mark kernel packages as "hold" to prevent upgrades.