Support of Raspberry Pi

[Aux]

@chwe

I would say - not really, have you read the specifications of the new RPi 3 B +?

 

Here short:

 

Here, is the list of the addons in latest Raspberry pi model 3B+

– A 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU
– Dual-band 802.11ac wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.2

– Faster Ethernet (Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0)

– Power-over-Ethernet support (with separate PoE HAT)

– Improved PXE network and USB mass-storage booting

– Improved thermal management

 

[Tido]

40 minutes ago, Aux said:

- not really, have you read

had u read this thread from the begin, u wouldn't ask

 

// sent from mobile phone //

[Aux]

I read from the beginning.
One should close this thread, because any discussions bring anyway nothing - Amen 

[Tido]

15 minutes ago, Aux said:

bring anyway nothing

Yes, but no.

If you go through this 60 posts you see that many came with that idea - and so we have a place to keep them. RPi is a great toy, there are many communities all around the world, but armbian isn't part of that.

[TonyMac32]

1 hour ago, Aux said:

– A 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU

Same SoC as Pi 3 clocked higher.

 

1 hour ago, Aux said:

– Dual-band 802.11ac wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.2

The only thing interesting at all, but not enough.

 

1 hour ago, Aux said:

– Faster Ethernet (Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0)

Same catastrophic design failure as every other Pi.  Useless "upgrade"

 

1 hour ago, Aux said:

– Power-over-Ethernet support (with separate PoE HAT)

I could do this with any board I currently own, make a PoE board for it.  Not at all special.

 

1 hour ago, Aux said:

– Improved PXE network and USB mass-storage booting

Still goofy firmware nonsense.

 

1 hour ago, Aux said:

– Improved thermal management

Well thank God since it was garbage before.

 

Sadly the Pi 3 B+ brings nothing of interest to the table when it doesn't even match competing boards that have been released and available for months to years.  Until they move away from the current series of SoC's they won't be of interest.  And they won't do that because it would break their compatibility and destroy the only thing they have that is worth note: the homogenous community support situation.

[Tido]

14 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

And they won't do that

Well, I guess with the next generation they must (because of H6, RK3399).
However, they will continue their legacy boards as industry and so many other projects built on RPi = perfect money machine for the upcoming years.

[TonyMac32]

Well, I guess with the next generation they must (because of H6, RK3399).
However, they will continue their legacy boards as industry and so many other projects built on RPi = perfect money machine for the upcoming years.

I don't think that will push them. The s905x destroys the Pi 3. The RK3288 destroys the Pi 3. The RK3328 destroys the Pi 3. The H5 destroys it as well. I've never seen a head to head with an H3, but if anything about USB or networking were involved I'm sure it would give the Pi a trouncing as well. In most conditions it's like putting a 4-function calculator up against a PC running Excel.

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

[tkaiser]

On 24.3.2018 at 4:24 PM, Aux said:

 

Would the new RPi3 B + be more interesting for ARMBIAN now?

 

 

No. It's uninteresting for these reasons:

 

RPi is a closed source platform, the main operating system bringing up and fully controlling the hardware (ThreadX running on the dual core VideoCore IV main CPU) can not be altered since... closed source and proprietary. All the relevant stuff happens completely there (DVFS for the ARM CPU cores, video decoding and so on) and the secondary OS running on the ARM cores has not even an idea what's going on (see for example all those RPi installations that constantly suffer from 'frequency capping'). All we as Armbians could do is to fiddle around with a secondary OS running on the 'guest' ARM CPU cores while everything interesting happens solely on the proprietary and closed source VideoCore. The community driven tries to replace ThreadX with something open sourced have stopped since the developers involved lost interest (some details)

 

The new board is a power hog able to consume close to 1800mA by running some CPU intensive stuff alone (see at the bottom of this nice review). In the past due to poorly-designed power circuitry an RPi 3 was not able to exceed ~1.5A anyway (voltage drops then occured and under-voltage 'protection' kicked in). Now this has improved but unfortunately the Pi is still equipped with a Micro USB port to be powered (rated for 1800mA maximum!) so even more users will run into underpowering hassles.

 

Headless RPi users are usually not even aware that they run under-volted (example, example, example, example) and if even under-voltage 'protection' (frequency capping turning the RPi into a 600 MHz board) doesn't help crashes, freezes, kernel panics occur that are usually considered 'software issues' (example). I believe the RPi people are well aware that powering with Micro USB is a shitty idea. But they do a great job masquerading the problem and try really hard to keep their users clueless (see this funny 'Micro USB powering' thread and how it ended -- archived version here, they love to censor over in their forum).

 

TL;DR: it's not fun but simply boring to bring Armbian to the RPi and support situation for both users and us here will be a nightmare (users expecting everything Raspbian compatible while we would have to deal with the results of crappy Micro USB powering being reported as software bugs and users miseducated by RPi people not able to realize that under-voltage is the problem and their '3A PSU' won't help here anyway. RPi folks really try hard to let their users focus on BS amperage ratings instead of explaining the real problem.

 

BTW: I know a bit what I'm talking about since having maintained an OS image for RPi 2, 3 and 3+ that gets downloaded +10,000 times each month.

[tkaiser]

Nice place over there BTW

 

 

So can not help any further diagnosing why Gigabit Ethernet with the new RPi 3 B+ is slower compared to Fast Ethernet  

[Igor]

38 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

Now this has improved but unfortunately the Pi is still equipped with a Micro USB port to be powered

Great Rpi innovations are coming to boards which lacks this superb way of powering 
 

Spoiler

 

 

[tkaiser]

4 minutes ago, Igor said:

Great Rpi innovations are coming to boards which lacks this superb way of powering 

 

Oh, yes. Really nice 'solution'. But if you lived only in Raspberry country you would already know that barrel plugs can't work and Micro USB is superiour.  

[tkaiser]

BTW: People interested in a decent arm64 Debian Stretch running on RPi 3 or 3+ could try this on a PC running a 64-bit Ubuntu or Debian with Docker:

git clone --depth=1 -b linux-4.14 https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/pi64 pi64
cd pi64

And then follow the instructions. Using the original Github repo should work too but there the 4.14 branch misses the routine to copy wireless firmware for the new board (PR not merged yet). Personally I think running a 64-bit OS on SBC with that low amounts of DRAM as the Raspberries is not worth a try.

[Tido]

1 hour ago, tkaiser said:

BTW: People interested in a decent arm64 Debian Stretch running on RPi 3 or 3+ could try this on a PC

LOL, I love to see your good will, but basically you just shot yourself in the foot with full intention

This is against all you have written before.

Aua !

[TonyMac32]

27 minutes ago, Tido said:

This is against all you have written before.

Aua !

Well, I think not.  As an example, I disagree with most VW design choices, and think their philosophy is quite flawed and would never open a garage to work on them, but I will not refuse to help a friend or acquaintance who owns one of the extremely service-hungry machines.

[chwe]

 

hmm that was fun to read..   their community reports stuff? (btw @Igor I think the report function isn't visible anymore for me, am I not allowed to report stuff anymore since I'm a mod here? )..

 

The microUSB is/was a great connector for charging mobile phones (not having 10 different chargers for the phones/tablets which are laying around helps a lot). A good connector has its price... As example, for Pt100 temperature readouts we use those LEMO connectors:

And yeah, you don't get them for a few bucks (normally a pair of them costs ~30$ ). But for this kind of applications, the price is of minor interest. 

 

When the input voltage isn't that important (charging a phone) the microUSB is okay. In a phone you don't have any 5V rails and as long as the PMIC does a decent job, the whole stuff at 1.8-3.3V works well. PMICs for SBCs are often a way more simple and the 5V rail is often without any control at all. As long as you use the a SBC headless, without stuff powered through the SBC, microUSB works quite well. But it seems that the new RPi is a way to power-hungry for microUSB powering (even in headless).. Because RPi offers a lot of shields, displays and other stuff to stick on in, I expect that their 'community managers' will have a lot of fun solving such issues in the future (or selling them their own 5.x V 2.5A PSU explaining that this should work..). FLIR on SBC without booting and consumption through pinheader (mounting a big hotplate or something like this) could be fun..  Seeing if the traces and the connector gets warm when the board consumes everything which is delivered.. 

 

3 hours ago, Tido said:

LOL, I love to see your good will, but basically you just shot yourself in the foot with full intention

By thinking this way, armbian shouldn't deliver images for microUSB driven boards cause it generates us more work explaining again and again that you should care about powering.. We shouldn't provide any hardware accelerated videodecoding as long as it doesn't work for kodi, cause by videodecoding the majority expect kodi...  

Try to provide a sane OS, even for RPis isn't a bad thing. 

As long as ThreadX isn't opensource and there is no opensource variant for the videocore layer, there is IMO no way for providing Armbian for RPis cause we do such stuff for optimizations. Doesn't mean that others shouldn't try to provide sane Images for RPis. We don't have the resources to provide support for an other board from which we expect a bunch of support issues (plus another platform which means maintaining another kernel and comparison why armbian doesn't provide the *random feature* which works with Raspian).  If someone needs 'Armbian a like' RPi images he/she should go for the OMV images and purge everything OMV related or stick it together on his own (Armbian rootfs + *random kernel* which fulfills his needs). Anyone who is able to do that should be able to solve issues on his own, or at least they understand how to use google to solve most of the problems...

[tkaiser]

12 hours ago, chwe said:

If someone needs 'Armbian a like' RPi images he/she should go for the OMV images and purge everything OMV related

Just for the record: This (using the OMV RPi image and removing the OMV parts) will not result in an Armbian installation (I'm aware that you've written about 'Armbian a like', just want to further clarify). It's just a Debian Jessie armhf rootfs generated by Armbian's build system that has been slightly adjusted and manually combined with RPi Foundation's kernel packages and the proprietary, closed sourced RPi stuff (ThreadX on the /boot partition and some proprietary userspace binaries to interact with VideoCore/ThreadX, most importantly to report/detect under-voltage).

 

Armbian is about:

1. bootloader and kernel optimizations (first not possible since closed source ThreadX, latter not reasonable/needed on Raspberries)
2. optimized settings to improve performance, consumption and thermal behaviour (not possible on RPi since done entirely on the VideoCore by ThreadX)
3. to improve security situation building an entire OS image from scratch so no one has fiddled around so far (if you use our build system and let it debootstrap a fresh Armbian image you know no one logged in so far and planted backdoors or stuff like that)

So the OMV image is just a modified piece of data that was falling out of Armbian's build system (the rootfs) manually adjusted to be combined with the proprietary and closed source stuff that still makes up the whole 'RPi experience' (for the majority of RPi users I personally know the Pi is just a KODI and retrogaming box and without the proprietary video decoding and 3D acceleration stuff on the VideoCore they would have to throw it away)

 

So all you get by using this OMV image is the illusion wrt 3) above (clean rootfs) but thinking this would enhance security or prevent you from being backdoored is just... an illusion. The main CPU of every RPi is still the outdated VideoCore from 2009 (this chip contains not only GPU, VPU and multiple QPU cores but also an ordinary dual core CPU inside running the closed source RTOS called ThreadX). The ARM cores running any secondary OS are just guests. Since Raspberries are popular for stuff like Tor end nodes or VPN gateways who knows whether GCHQ already ordered the Foundation to ship their ThreadX with an universal backdoor to allow agency access?)

 

Anyway: maybe the OMV image's only real advantage is that it's Jessie based but still gets RPi Foundation's kernel updates (we do this via apt pinning since for whatever reasons someone at the Pi Foundation decided last year to cut off all their Jessie users from future kernel updates, weakening the security of all these installations). But if you're not running OMV (where OMV releases are bound to the underlying Debian release -- OMV 3 needs Jessie and OMV 4 simply wasn't ready last year) then why not using Stretch anyway? Raspbian isn't bad, it's just somewhat bloated.

 

As usual the 2 most important things you can do to improve general RPi performance/responsiveness is

• Checking whether your powering is sufficient, you need to call perl -e "printf \"%19b\n\", $(vcgencmd get_throttled | -f2 -d=)" and have a look at the left whether there is a '1' (explanation). If you see there a 1 you're running 'frequency capped' at 600 MHz when performance would be needed. You must call vcgencmd since the usual ways to query CPU clockspeed are all fake (don't tell it over at the RPi forum -- for this you will get censored and banned  )
• Throwing away your old and slow SD card and start with a new, genuine and A1 rated SD card of at least 16 GB in size (I would go with an A1 Extreme and not an A1 Ultra for the simple reason that most probably RPi folks with their next 'incremental Pi update' next year will finally implement SDR104 to speed up SD card access. This and better Wi-Fi is almost all they've left to once again sell their fanboys an 'improvement')

Please note that both 'performance tweaks' are hardware and not software fixes.

[Tido]

18 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

I will not refuse to help

Well, if you read all postings from TK with regard to support RPi @armbian you understand my text.

 

14 hours ago, chwe said:

microUSB driven boards

This is just one of many points TK holds against supporting RPi. Basically I could copy the text above for here as well.

 

And I agree with TK on that point - RPi is a different beast, with different customer/user. While most of the RPi in the world are dust-collector.

[tkaiser]

To somewhat close the chapter...

 

Since my usual 'storage performance test setup' was lying around and the last RPi I own next to it I thought I do some quick iozone measurements. Once under-volted and one time with 'turbo mode' enabled (it was totally sufficient to replace my 20AWG rated Micro USB cable with a random one from the drawer -- sufficient to let voltage drop below 4.65V and activate 'frequency capping').

 

EVO840 SSD in JMS567 enclosure, latest RPi 4.9.80 ARMv7 kernel (no UAS), Armbian tweaks active since testing on the OMV image (improved IO scheduler settings and so on). Test call as usual: iozone -e -I -a -s 100M -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 1024k -r 16384k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2

Raspberry 2 @ 600 MHz (under-volted)                          random    random
              kB  reclen    write  rewrite    read    reread    read     write
          102400       4     7369     8290     8481     8544     8132     8034
          102400      16    17151    18160    18169    17947    17780    18290
          102400     512    29496    29712    28776    28933    28884    29574
          102400    1024    28866    29460    28840    28871    28801    29370
          102400   16384    32732    34210    35102    34205    35089    34904                                                  

Raspberry 2 @ 900 MHz                                         random    random
              kB  reclen    write  rewrite    read    reread    read     write
          102400       4    10117    10628    10620    10645    10101    10669
          102400      16    19907    21311    20776    21271    20627    21289
          102400     512    29364    29938    29191    29249    29244    30150
          102400    1024    30277    30554    29603    29379    29564    30342
          102400   16384    34284    35908    36678    36675    36232    36277

 

[tauroblau]

[Warning:  Machine translation]

Hi all. I have several plates and when I tried armbian with orange pi it seemed much better than raspian in rasberry pi 3, with this I want to thank igor for his effort and dedication to clear armbian. in the orange pi plus 2 I mounted a vpn but was a bit slow because of the characteristics of the plate. 100mbs ethernet bottleneck. And I read by ay that the rbp b + reaches ba to 300 mbs but with raspbian I do not like the result so I would like to install Armbian. someone can advise me to do thank you and happy year to all

 

Original Content:

Quote

Hola, a todos. yo tengo varias placas y cuando probe armbian con orange pi me parecio mucho mejor que raspbian en rasberry pi 3 ,con esto quiero agradecer a igor por su esfuerzo y dedicacion al clear armbian. en la orange pi plus 2 me monte una vpn pero iba un poco lenta por las caracteristias de la placa .el cuello de botella de 100mbs de ethernet.  Y lei por ay que la rbp b + llega ba a 300 mbs pero con raspbian no me gusta nada el resultado por lo que me gustaria instalarle armbian .  alguien me puede aconsejar que hacer    muchas gracias  y feliz año para todos

 

[TonyMac32]

Hola tauroblau,

 

    If possible please use English on the forums, it is quite helpful to everyone, since all told there are probably over 10 (low estimate) languages spoken by the various members.

 

For the Pi there is no plan on supporting that family of boards.  They embody many of the things we point to as fundamental problems with basic board design (micro USB power, horrible I/O bandwidth, propagandist marketing, just plain wrong benchmarking, I could go on.  The 300 Mbps on the RPi will be significantly affected (negatively) by any other USB peripheral, like a storage drive.  I would recommend researching other boards and finding one with GbE for your needs, the RK3328 boards, RK3288 boards, etc.  They are pricier, but if you need the performance, you will have it.

[NicoD]

2 hours ago, tauroblau said:

And I read by ay that the rbp b + reaches ba to 300 mbs but with raspbian I do not like the result so I would like to install Armbian.

 

31 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

They are pricier, but if you need the performance, you will have it.

Rock64 is cheap. It`s got Gb Ethernet, USB3, better ram, 64-bit os`es, eMMC socket, 4x1.5Ghz...
The RK3399`s are blazing fast, also all the things the Rock64 has, but faster and even more. I like the Rock Pi 4b the most, there are many other choices.
As Tony sais, the Raspberry`s are not very good. Undervoltage, lying about clockspeeds, slowest ram, unstable, and the biggest problem, a community of only trolls. When real problems are shownthey laugh you out and change what you`ve written in their forum.
Here some video`s to help you in your choices:

Video that shows the Raspberry £B+ doesn`t show the real clockspeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDWv0A36W9s&t=2s

Review of the Rock64(it has gotten better, now it`s really 1.5Ghz)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oX7TabSROw&t=306s

Review of the NanoPi M4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgj9mR6Pl04

Review of the Rock Pi 4B
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eV-uPOyVlg&t=2s

Review of the Odroid C2 (old, but still good)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_wmQN00vW8&t=1s

 

[sfx2000]

2 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

For the Pi there is no plan on supporting that family of boards.  They embody many of the things we point to as fundamental problems with basic board design (micro USB power, horrible I/O bandwidth, propagandist marketing, just plain wrong benchmarking, I could go on.  The 300 Mbps on the RPi will be significantly affected (negatively) by any other USB peripheral, like a storage drive.  I would recommend researching other boards and finding one with GbE for your needs, the RK3328 boards, RK3288 boards, etc.  They are pricier, but if you need the performance, you will have it.

 

I would agree - and there's not a lot of value add for the effort that would be needed to support three different Broadcom SoC architectures - the RPi community has their own rich ecosystem, and there's formal support from Ubuntu (and other distros) if one wants more than what Raspbian has.

 

Where Armbian shines - the project brings mainline support for SoC's (Rockchip, Allwinner, Amlogic are good examples) that do not have the best vendor support (old and outdated BSP's, bootloaders, etc) - RPi doesn't need that level of support. If Armbian wasn't there, many of these boards would be less than useful for many.

[nachoparker]

Hi all,

 

I wrote a blog post about some of the issues with the Raspberry Pi that you can find scattered around this and other forums. Hopefully it will save us time from repeating ourselves over and over again.

 

As we know, people don't read the forums until it's too late.

https://ownyourbits.com/2019/02/02/whats-wrong-with-the-raspberry-pi/

 

Thanks tkaiser, I took a sample output from your vcgencmd script.

[chwe]

well their official forum is quite entertaining..   I had some fun the last days when someone proposed that the next pi should have GbE and their mod explained that by 'electrical characteristics' doesn't really matter to me.. As usual those threads get closed.. and due to heavy bloating.. it's soon out of the first page and therefore nobody will see it anymore..

 

On 12/31/2018 at 5:23 PM, NicoD said:

the biggest problem, a community of only trolls

I wouldn't fully agree on this one. There are some good people there.. Also people exactly knowing the RPis limitations.. Obviously their paid moderators/developers have to defend their product.. Hey it's part of their job, not always the way I prefer but understandable.. I think the reason you think it's full of trolls is cause they show up first when write something which doesn't end in 'those guys in Cambridge are superior compared to other SBC makers'... They have somehow a weird relationship with the VC4 but well, everybody is free to love whatever s/he wants.. The problem with the RPi is still the 32bit/64bit mixup.. If supported most of the 'nice' features wouldn't work due to 'only 32bit workable' yet..

The potential amount of 'customers' would increase whereas chances that new devs will join cause of the RPi are rather low.. A decent dev could already add the RPi to Armbians buildscript, it would need some hacks here and there.. but it's not that much an issue to do it. Personally I don't see a reason to do it. For most use-cases there are simply better SBCs on market for a similar price.

 

On 12/31/2018 at 4:36 PM, TonyMac32 said:

fundamental problems with basic board design (micro USB power,

how dare you are---

On 12/31/2018 at 4:36 PM, TonyMac32 said:

RK3288 boards

whereas the only supported RK3288 board is even more powerhungry and also powered by microUSB..

 

On 12/31/2018 at 7:40 PM, sfx2000 said:

Where Armbian shines - the project brings mainline support for SoC's (Rockchip, Allwinner, Amlogic are good examples) that do not have the best vendor support (old and outdated BSP's, bootloaders, etc)

well we shouldn't support boards based on the shittyness of support they have... I would prefer one based on 'interesting features'.. If a 'new RPi' is based on a interesting SoC with some nice features without threadX why not? But I don't think this will ever happen, they're just too much tied to broadcom..

 

 

[TonyMac32]

@chwe I think I have clearly outlined the issues with the Tinker, although, magically it seems, the PMIC seems to make all the difference, voltage drops don't wipe out the SD/SoC, worst case seems to be USB peripherals disappearing.

[NicoD]

On 2/4/2019 at 2:34 PM, nachoparker said:

https://ownyourbits.com/2019/02/02/whats-wrong-with-the-raspberry-pi/

A good read.
I've learned something. I didn't know the ethernet and usb share the same line. The thing is even crappier than I thought.
I would also have complained (a lot) about their ancient ddr2 RAM chips. I find this the biggest flaw in the design of the 3B+. The SoC is so bottlenecked by this that even at OC of 1.5Ghz, it performs very badly on ram dependend tasks. 

The thing is just one collection of design flaws. I don't know what was going on while they were designing the 3B/3B+. They were clearly not concentrating on their work.
Either they don't have good testers, or they just don't listen to their concerns. All these issues should have been fixed after the first tests.

I still love my 2B, and still use it often. That's got advantages towards other sbc's(power efficient, no throttling, much more stable, ...) I still hope they're going to do better with the next one. But for now I'm going to use my RK3399's and dream of the Odroid N2.
Great job, thanks.

[manuti]

On 2/14/2019 at 6:31 PM, NicoD said:

I still love my 2B

One of the more honest Raspberry Pi ... today I think the RPi 3A+ is more decent, honest and humble with the user.

I complaint about the bottle neck longtime ago  https://raspberryparatorpes.net/dudas/el-cuello-de-botella-de-la-raspberry-pi/ in Spanish of course.

 

[TonyMac32]

On 2/18/2019 at 9:16 AM, manuti said:

On 2/14/2019 at 12:31 PM, NicoD said:

I still love my 2B

One of the more honest Raspberry Pi ... today I think the RPi 3A+ is more decent, honest and humble with the user. 

 

I agree.  The 2B is the one I use when I have to, the 3A+ at least represents the SoC's physical reality.

[PaulB]

I was interested in Armbian as an option for either a Raspberry Pi3B+ or an Odroid XU4 but this insulting forum has completely turned me off from wanting to engage with this nonsensically, virulently anti raspberry community. Good Luck with the project though, Armbian looks an incredibly well designed OS. Shame about the fanboys.

[Tido]

19 hours ago, PaulB said:

Good Luck with the project though, Armbian looks an incredibly well designed OS

Thank you.

And have fun with RPi, there is a place for everybody. However, comparing a Porsche and a Dacia  (XU4 vs RPi) ... I guess you don't know what you really need.