Review Banana Pi M3

[tkaiser]

My specific use case is a network monitoring device. Basically i want to send all network traffic (internal as well as external) to the device and apply some monitoring to it. That's why it needs a high performant network interface, and some decent processing power. Ive tested it on the rpi3, and while it works fine for very small networks, I would love to improve the performance a little bit.

 

Well, still missing some bits of information to give a recommendation (no idea what's the bottleneck). At least when this should be some sort of sniffing a 2nd network interface and decent processing power would be great and then it's already time to think about x86 based solution (BTW: That's one of the advantages of Apple MacBooks like the ones i use: By simply plugging in one or two $25 devices one gets one or two more GbE NICs -- connected through PCIe and not Thunderbolt -- that can be used for real-time sniffing by intercepting all traffic on a wire)

[Lion Wang]

Banana pi BPI-M3 android source code public:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_YnvHgh2rwjXzVwWk94WWdQRmM

[buratino]

Hello, friends!

I will share my experience. The seller sent me a broken banana pi. Inductance is damaged on the board. ,  Where I noticed the Close-up closeup the Close-up closeup 2  Council work, but on the net there were errors. I did not want to send it, because in Russia the cargo is a lottery. I offered to return a small part of the money to me. I do not think that this breakdown is serious. I soldered the inductance, I soldered the power plug, he behaved badly.  
But the seller refused to return a small part of the money. I do not want to complain, but to warn people that the seller is not loyal. Now my board is  working ,  I'm sorry, I filled the board with the composition , but I do not know where to get a good operating system. In those that are available on the site, the  banana pi  does not work. What will the community tell me?

Why are not Enthusiasts engaged in Armbian for this board?

 

  

 

[buratino]

Today, including the board, I noticed that the kernel is not always loaded exactly.  I'm using the debian 8 kernel 3.4.39, desktop mate.  Once the board loads it can work well, work clearly, without errors, all interfaces and devices will be available.  But the board can be loaded incorrectly.  There will always be errors, not all interfaces and devices will work.  There is a serious problem, there is no support for the UART kernel.  I want to communicate with the community, I want to learn how to enable the UART kernel in the bootloader?

[buratino]

On 05.02.2018 at 4:54 PM, buratino said:

Hello, friends!

I will share my experience. The seller sent me a broken banana pi. Inductance is damaged on the board. ,  Where I noticed the Close-up closeup the Close-up closeup 2  Council work, but on the net there were errors. I did not want to send it, because in Russia the cargo is a lottery. I offered to return a small part of the money to me. I do not think that this breakdown is serious. I soldered the inductance, I soldered the power plug, he behaved badly.  
But the seller refused to return a small part of the money. I do not want to complain, but to warn people that the seller is not loyal. Now my board is  working ,  I'm sorry, I filled the board with the composition , but I do not know where to get a good operating system. In those that are available on the site, the  banana pi  does not work. What will the community tell me?

Why are not Enthusiasts engaged in Armbian for this board?

 

  

 

Today the seller returned the money for the damaged board. I am grateful to him.

[Igor]

Update:
 

http://ix.io/1fUK

Broken: wired, wireless network, Bluetooth, ...

Works: serial console, 8 cores, DVFS, USB, SATA, HDMI, DRM video driver, ...

 

https://dl.armbian.com/bananapim3

[tkaiser]

10 hours ago, Igor said:

SATA

 

There is no SATA on this board. It's important to not spread wrong rumours. Banana Pi M3 just like Orange Pi Plus simply uses the most crappy USB2-to-SATA bridge on earth:

• Slow as hell: https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/03/16/suptronics-x800-2-5-sata-drive-expansion-board-and-cases-for-raspberry-pi-23-and-odroid-c2-boards/#comment-540228
• Broken: https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/03/16/suptronics-x800-2-5-sata-drive-expansion-board-and-cases-for-raspberry-pi-23-and-odroid-c2-boards/#comment-540247

What's the purpose of providing an Armbian image for this board? Encouraging users to buy it since 'Armbian support is there'? Why not better spending the time on fixing the forum (broken on iOS at least, a huge fixed Armbian logo on top of each thread prevents reading thread titles and top post)

 

Are you aware that SinoVoip produced a new M3 batch now using an incompatible eMMC, needing some fancy instructions to get their own images working?

[Igor]

3 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

What's the purpose of providing an Armbian image for this board?

That those few who had bad luck buying this board can perhaps use it?
 

4 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

Are you aware that SinoVoip produced a new M3 batch now using an incompatible eMMC

Well, I am not planning to provide any support for it. I saw patches ... A83T is a first big/little with a mainline support. I just needed to see how it works.

[tkaiser]

7 minutes ago, Igor said:

A83T is a first big/little with a mainline support

 

Huh? The A80 predecessor was big.LITTLE but this here is just little.LITTLE (just like with Vim2 or NanoPi M3 or NanoPi Fire3) and all these other boards combining two clusters made of slow CPU cores have pretty decent kernel support. Or are you talking about uninteresting EOLed Allwinner SoCs only?

 

I already though about a detection for those poor little.LITTLE designs since 'armbianmonitor -m' output is highly misleading sometimes showing different clockspeeds for the two clusters that clock in reality always identical.

[Igor]

1 minute ago, tkaiser said:

Or are you talking about uninteresting EOLed Allwinner SoCs only?

Yes  A80 was prior to this, but support was also never mainlined. It is probably getting support with this batch ...  A80 is even bigger exotics and there are just little boards out there.

[tkaiser]

59 minutes ago, Igor said:

A80 was prior to this, but support was also never mainlined. It is probably getting support with this batch

 

Sure, 'the Allwinner syndrome'. Once the SoC is EOL and can not be purchased any more the brave souls over at linux-sunxi finished mainline kernel support. Situation 3-4 years ago was different but today I really have no clue why to waste a single second on anything Allwinner that is not also cheap as hell (talking about the small OPi and NanoPi boards) or makes good use of Allwinner's battery support (PineBook, Olimex' Teres, Olimex Lime/Lime2 boards that use the battery to provide full 'UPS functionality' since also powering USB and SATA devices via step up converters)

 

Banana Pi M3 with its outdated 32-bit Cortex-A7 little cores and the totally unsupported PowerVR GPU is even more expensive than faster little.LITTLE designs like NanoPi Fire3 or even true big.LITTLE designs like ODROID XU4/HC1/HC2 (the latter also with an USB-to-SATA bridge but USB3 based and more than 25 times faster than the crappy GL830 on the M3).

[Tido]

I have to admit that we should freeze/remove BPi M3 images and also freeze threads of it.

BUT, mention equivalent SBCs like the ones TK listed.

 

Who supports this ?

[tkaiser]

7 minutes ago, Tido said:

Who supports this ?

 

Me not since I hate censorship (freezing/manipulating threads).

 

BPi M3 is not listed here https://www.armbian.com/download/?tx_maker=sinovoip so far and if it remains like this I'm fine with it. We all know that SinoVoip has a great history of false advertising (and misleading announcements) so I would prefer if Igor replaces in such 'announcements' like this all details with a simple link to this forum. So users thinking about buying this board have a way to inform themselves without any censorship involved (the 'sinovoip team bpi' monkey over in their forum reportedly censored over and over again)

 

Wrt 'equivalent SBCs' IMO there exists no such thing. It's always about use cases and that's what potential buyers have to think about first. But as far as I noticed the average BPi M3 buyer got fooled by the impression he gets 'native SATA' on the M3 just like on the older Bananas and that people think '8 cores' make up for great computing power (which is BS especially on a board with a broken thermal design and no way to attach a suitable heatsink).

 

 

[Tido]

3 hours ago, tkaiser said:

with a simple link to this forum

useless, it has 5 pages = TL;DR

[BPI_M3-Robs]

On 7/3/2018 at 10:45 PM, Igor said:

http://ix.io/1fUK

 

Broken: wired, wireless network, Bluetooth, ...

The wired issue can perhaps solved by:

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10515589/

 

Regards

 

Robert

[BPI_M3-Robs]

Hi,

 

I`m now testing the actual armbian on my Banana Pi M3(kernel 4.17.13). It's working quite well (networking included), but I'm suffering on a special issue:

I need the I2C on the PinHeaders running. After several hours testing with https://docs.armbian.com/Hardware_Allwinner_overlays/#armbianenvtxt-entries-reference I have to surrender.

Is there any way to create /boot/dtb/overlay/sun8i-a83t-i2c1.dtbo?

 

Thanks for any hint about i2c on a83t

 

Robert

[Igor]

21 minutes ago, BPI_M3-Robs said:

need the I2C on the PinHeaders running. After several hours testing with

Supported board vs. unsupported boards is exactly this. I can only confirm that there is no overlay support for this board/chip and no plan nor resources to add it. 

 

You can should be able to enable I2C manually by editing device tree blob.

 

Edit: solution can be probably reached by reading this: https://github.com/armbian/sunxi-DT-overlays then testing, implementing and sending a PR: https://docs.armbian.com/Process_Contribute/

[BPI_M3-Robs]

Hi,

 

I found a solution for my problem.  Here a short description:

My self made i2c-device is connected to the pinheaders Pins 3(SDA)+5(SCL). Those pins are routed to internally to PH4+5

 

Acc to: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/arch/arm/boot/dts/sun8i-a83t.dtsi?h=v4.18&id=f066f46ce5a518b66ff728b4903c0b916ea7ca41

the pin-definitions of i2c2 in sun8i-a83t.dtsi are missing intentionally.

To activate i2c on those pins a patch is needed to assign the pins (copied to userpatches/kernel/sunxi-dev/):

 

diff --git a/arch/arm/boot/dts/sun8i-a83t.dtsi b/arch/arm/boot/dts/sun8i-a83t.dtsi
index 0233008..aa48aa7 100644
--- a/arch/arm/boot/dts/sun8i-a83t.dtsi
+++ b/arch/arm/boot/dts/sun8i-a83t.dtsi
@@ -882,6 +882,8 @@
                        interrupts = <GIC_SPI 8 IRQ_TYPE_LEVEL_HIGH>;
                        clocks = <&ccu CLK_BUS_I2C2>;
                        resets = <&ccu RST_BUS_I2C2>;
+                       pinctrl-names = "default";
+                       pinctrl-0 = <&i2c2_ph_pins>;
                        status = "disabled";
                        #address-cells = <1>;
                        #size-cells = <0>;

 

and activate on the target:

/dts-v1/;
/plugin/;

/ {
        compatible = "allwinner,sun8i-a83t";

        fragment@0 {
                target-path = "/aliases";
                __overlay__ {
                        i2c2 = "/soc/i2c@01c2b400";
                };
        };

        fragment@1 {
                target = <&i2c2>;
                __overlay__ {
                        status = "okay";
                };
        };
};

 

So its working now fine for me. Why don`t I send a PR? I do not like to cause interferences with other devices, because i2c-2 is missing intentionally. So if somebody needs i2c on PH4 and PH5 will find this here by google. And not so may people use i2c on Banana Pi M3 :-).

 

Regards Robert

 

 

banana-pi-m3-i2c-2.patch

sun8i-a83t-i2c2.dts

[John34]

Hello Everyone :)

 

I have buy a BananaPi M3 and i have try Armbian with ubuntu & debian but no one works, that is to say, all start perfect but when i try to use it or start some applications the system is frozen and nothing move. So i have tried other Arm Distribution but no ones is really good, i have used this file to try and install on my Banana Ubuntu Bionic & this one too Debian Stretch. I see that my Banana Pi M3 is really hot when the system is frozen. So if someone has some ideas about that or just tell me if there is another version which is working ? Thanks a lot :)

[buratino]

Use Archlinux. The Archlinux community has made an alarm project.

[John34]

Hello Buratino Thanks a lot for your answer i thought this subject in this forum was dead active. Ok so you tell me Archlinux, okay but it would says that there is some .img available with a desktop already loaded like xfce, mate or other ? Or i should build all myself ? :'( have you got some URL links to share please ? Thanks

[buratino]

I took from the site archlinuks section of the project alarm. There is a bare core, everything you have to assemble yourself. The only thing is that I could not figure out the bootloader and transfer the kernel to EMMC memory.

[Igor]

6 hours ago, John34 said:

I see that my Banana Pi M3 is really hot when the system is frozen. So if someone has some ideas about that or just tell me if there is another version which is working ?

This is the best what exists and we are aware its not done yet. That's why there is still only a DEV version, labelled testing and it does not receive support. The only other option is kernel 3.4.x based stock images which other problems.

 

It probably hangs due to power related problems - make sure you have a solid power supply, heat sink. If that doesn't help, limit max. cpu frequency to 1400000 in/etc/default/cpufrequtils and reboot or restart the cpufrequtils service.

No other OS out there will give you better results.

[John34]

@IgorYes, i don't have any heatsink on this bananaPiM3, i'm going to buy 4 big heatsink. My power is a 5V/2A like recommended

@buratino ah ok i thought archlinux on ARM have done a version complete with an integrated desktop environment like ubuntu or debian.

[Igor]

6 hours ago, John34 said:

ah ok i thought archlinux on ARM have done a version complete with an integrated desktop environment like ubuntu or debian.

We provide minimal (and optimised for boards with low resources) XFCE based desktop out of the box. If there are no images, you need to enable/install this desktop from armbian-config. Since situation with ARM and with single board computers is special, userspace and the desktop is last thing that matters. If you don't heavily deal with the kernel, your board function will be very poor. Mainstream distribution doesn't deal with boards like Bananapi M3. They rely on www.kernel.org which is up to one year behind our kernel. Some functions might never be accepted and some default board settings are off by default.

 

6 hours ago, John34 said:

i'm going to buy 4 big heatsink. My power is a 5V/2A like recommended

IMO one 20x20x** on the CPU should do ... but when proper thermal throttling is implemented, this will be needed only for getting better performance since CPU will drop frequency automatically when certain temp is reached. This is not working ATM ... and desktop environment is pretty irrelevant if things as such doesn't work.

For power supply, do some measurement how is the with the voltage under the load. Sometimes there are problems with Bananapi company recommendations. 

[John34]

@Igor hi :), ah! so the dimension about the CPU is 20x20 ? in this case if it's right i'm going to find one which are 20x20x20or30 will be perfect to cooling the CPU, what did you think ? And do you know a website which can sell this heatsink, because i find on aliexpress but it make so long time to arrive at destination.

[Igor]

4 minutes ago, John34 said:

@Igor hi :), ah! so the dimension about the CPU is 20x20 ? in this case if it's right i'm going to find one which are 20x20x20or30 will be perfect to cooling the CPU, what did you think ? And do you know a website which can sell this heatsink, because i find on aliexpress but it make so long time to arrive at destination.

I usually buy on Ebay & Aliexpress but this time in the year is not the best time  For an experiment, improvisations as such

Spoiler

might help. I assume you have plenty of coins?  

[John34]

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL very nice on a pretty raspberry Well i have took some dimension and it's 14or15 for the cpu on BananaPiM3 so i must find 14x14x20 or 15x15x20 i'm going to look on ebay too.

 

[John34]

If someone knows how to have the Temperature of CPU in armbian under UbuntuBionic pls ? what we must install like .deb ? Because in htop CPU TEMP = 0°c

 

 

 

[buratino]

Yes, on a banana with a temperature in general is a problem. On Archlinux also does not show, /sys/class/temp/zone0 is empty.