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Banana Pi R2


pollux_master

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Since my current board (Cubieboard 2) has been kicked out of the game, it's time to move on to a new one.

 

Is there any chance to see an Armbian version for the Banana Pi R2 someday?

 

This board is winner for me because of the Dual SATA feature (the router, not so much).

 

If there are no plans for this board, please tell me for how long you'll support the Cubietruck, since it's my second choice.

 

Thx in advance...

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you opened Pandora's box (again)... 

 

I suggest you read through this one:

and through this one too:

 

short answer, it's unlikely that this happens. 

 

Some 'rules' here (I don't like rules but it's necessary cause it went terrible wrong the last time)... I'll immediately close this thread when it goes in the same direction than the old ones. If it comes down to a personal level of insults --> closed

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7 hours ago, pollux_master said:

Is there any chance to see an Armbian version for the Banana Pi R2 someday?

 

Somewhat probable due to the reason that the R2 is the only device so far supported by its board vendor. Unlike all the other Bananas for which their users get zero support over at forum.banana-pi.org if you look into http://forum.banana-pi.org/c/Banana-Pi-BPI-R2 there's a really high level of both end user and developer support (@garywang being pretty busy, a couple of MediaTek engineers doing the same and 'frank-w' as a volunteer even providing great documentation ressources -- something Banana folks still are either not willing or able to do).

 

Since MediaTek also actively upstreams code to official u-boot and Linux projects once mainline support is mature enough Armbian might add the board. The situation one year ago was totally differently so this all is a nice surprise (please keep that in mind when reading through old threads dealing with R2)

 

So 'someday' this might happen but I don't think anytime soon since it's an entirely new platform (MediaTek MT7623) and adding new platforms to Armbian requires an enourmous amount of work but we're very low on (developer) ressources. And once we would add R2 immediately people would start to ask about Banana Pi W2 and Banana Pi R64 which again both rely on other entirely different platform so initial software support efforts would be insanely high again (it's not about boards, it's about SoCs/platforms).

 

Let me add some notes since you seem to believe into 'SATA is always better'.

  • The 'native SATA' implementations on SBC differ a lot with Allwinner SATA as present on Cubietruck and other A20 devices being the slowest one. Surprisingly USB3 attached SATA outperforms old 'native SATA' on A20/i.MX6 in every area (even random IO included!)
  • 'Dual SATA' on R2 is not 'native' but PCIe attached which has its own downsides and depends partially on the PCIe adapter being used (the R2 uses a cheap ASM1061 which is not 'wrong' but can result in some problems in some situations, see N1 link below with explanations/references)
  • Armbian currently supports the following boards with SATA implementations worth a look (excluding Allwinner and i.MX6 SATA): Clearfog Base (1 to 5 SATA ports), Clearfog Pro (1 to 9 SATA ports), Helios4 (four SATA ports), EspressoBin (1 to 5 SATA ports). The Clearfogs and EspressoBin have a mPCIe slot where you can add 2 or even 4 SATA ports with an appropriate PCIe controller. On the Clearfogs you can also turn one or even two mPCIe slots into mSATA so with cheap mechanical converters they provide 2 or even 3 'native SATA' ports (that outperform every PCIe attached solution)
  • Armbian in the future will support the RK3399 platform with a ton of new boards arriving in 2018. While RK3399 is also a new platform from a software point of view it's pretty close to RK3288 and RK3328 which we already support. Since RK3399 has PCIe capabilities there will be a bunch of boards with multiple SATA ports soon since adding an ASM1061 to a PCIe lane cost the board makers just a few bucks.

In other words: If you want to use Armbian there's already a couple of options for 2 or even more really fast SATA ports. Ok-ish SATA will appear on a lot more boards in 2018 and it's important to understand that especially with HDDs USB3/UAS attached SATA isn't necessarily worse than PCIe attached SATA (but the controller and the firmware matter and this applies to both USB3 and PCIe attached SATA). Both USB3/UAS and PCIe attached SATA outperform old 'native SATA' on A20 and i.MX6.

 

References / Further reading:

Reading through all of this will take some time of course but later you know why you most probably don't want a Cubietruck or any other A20 device any more if you're interested in storage (performance). I'm 'sorry' to say that Armbian is not only about throwing out software but is also a research project. Since all supported devices behave more or less the same once Armbian runs on them it's important to understand the hardware differences to be able to pick the board that suits your own needs best.

 

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Thanks @tkaiser, your explanation couldn't be better.

 

SATA performance isn't an issue for me, but a good (and cheap) board with SATA (native or no) support is needed due to physical placement.

 

A20 and similar devices are widely available here in Brazil; other China-delivered devices take a really long time to arrive, and sometimes they even don't reach this tropical soil.

 

Since I discovered Armbian, never considered using another SO for development boards, and I will not even try searching for another. No Armbian, no board! :)

 

Again, thanks a lot for the explanation.

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58 minutes ago, pollux_master said:

A20 and similar devices are widely available here in Brazil

Well, I don't think we'll ever drop support for A20 in general. The reason Cubieboard2 went from supported to EOL is simply that without physical samples it's hard to maintain support: https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/3a485f02d8ca3956441c4cb9091415c69f348103

 

So if you choose a rather conservative update policy (use armbian-config to freeze u-boot/kernel updates, check forum from time to time for issues and then unfreeze/update/freeze -- in an ideal world cloning the SD card prior to that so you've always a backup) you can further have fun with your CB2 as long as the hardware does the job...

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When I had a look at upstream yesterday I was quite impressed how much MediaTek (still) contributes to mainline. Congrats @sean.wang I appreciate that MT decided to go into this direction! The reason I see it unlikely is less the mainline support, more that there's only one board available with this SoC. In the meantime there are some other boards which fulfill some of this specs too. As @tkaiser described better than I can. :) 

'Good' sata performance gets cheaper those days.. :) 

 

1 hour ago, pollux_master said:

SATA performance isn't an issue for me, but a good (and cheap) board with SATA (native or no) support is needed due to physical placement.

Hmm, when it's not about performance a reliable USB-Sata bridge together with a H3 board might be an idea? In terms of support these newer boards might be 'more maintained'.

 

36 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

So if you choose a rather conservative update policy (use armbian-config to freeze u-boot/kernel updates, check forum from time to time for issues and then unfreeze/update/freeze

A bit offtopic but would it make sense to freeze kernel update by default for EOL boards? 

 

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23 hours ago, tkaiser said:

Well, I don't think we'll ever drop support for A20 in general. The reason Cubieboard2 went from supported to EOL is simply that without physical samples it's hard to maintain support: https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/3a485f02d8ca3956441c4cb9091415c69f348103

 

So if you choose a rather conservative update policy (use armbian-config to freeze u-boot/kernel updates, check forum from time to time for issues and then unfreeze/update/freeze -- in an ideal world cloning the SD card prior to that so you've always a backup) you can further have fun with your CB2 as long as the hardware does the job...

 

Thanks again for the suggestions. I already made backup image of the sd card, because it's working just fine...

 

23 hours ago, chwe said:

Hmm, when it's not about performance a reliable USB-Sata bridge together with a H3 board might be an idea? In terms of support these newer boards might be 'more maintained'.

 

I'v been considering buy another board for a while, but the budget isn't helping :(

 

Anyway, many thanks for the suggestion!

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1 hour ago, pollux_master said:

 

I'v been considering buy another board for a while, but the budget isn't helping :(

 

If it's not about the native sata you should really think about a dirt cheap H3 board (maybe a orange pi one for 10$, about 33R$) and a also cheap but uas capable and supported usb3-sata-bridge (maybe another 5$, about 16R$).

 

If you want to do your self a little favor you could also thinking of upgrading the H3 to a H5, for example with a Orange Pi PC 2 (about 18$ or 58R$) which comes with one very nice advantage: gigabit Ethernet.

 

So also if the budget is small it can work out :P

 

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17 minutes ago, finally said:

If it's not about the native sata

 

There's no native SATA on the R2 anyway. ;)

 

It's PCIe attached SATA provided by the cheapest SATA chip available: ASM1061. I'll just reiterate this for the simple reason since there exist differences between 'native SATA' as on all those Marvell boards we support and this type of PCIe attached SATA (with ASM1061 performance is lower though that is only of interest with SSDs and not HDD... and there might be issues with NCQ, especially when combined with SSD and TRIM).

 

Anyway: if 'SATA' is needed and some performance drop is OK and the importance of UAS and good USB-to-SATA bridges are understood there are a lot of opportunities: https://forum.openmediavault.org/index.php/Thread/19871-Which-energy-efficient-ARM-platform-to-choose/?postID=154980#post154980

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On 08/03/2018 at 12:32 PM, finally said:

 

If it's not about the native sata you should really think about a dirt cheap H3 board (maybe a orange pi one for 10$, about 33R$) and a also cheap but uas capable and supported usb3-sata-bridge (maybe another 5$, about 16R$).

 

If you want to do your self a little favor you could also thinking of upgrading the H3 to a H5, for example with a Orange Pi PC 2 (about 18$ or 58R$) which comes with one very nice advantage: gigabit Ethernet.

 

So also if the budget is small it can work out :P

 

 

Thanks for the tips, I'll check them out.

 

:beer:

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