Bring up for Odroid N2 (Meson G12B)

[MichaIng]

schedutil is my default governor, where I recognised the issue first. Tested several times, same like with ondemand the little cores stay at 100 MHz during tmpfs file read and write. Also I'm not sure whether it triggers on I/O alone, as has no option for this like ondemand.

[rpardini]

On 1/25/2022 at 2:28 PM, lanefu said:

any additional context to add about our N2 woes?

 

Yeah, valid to mention I did a big rework of current/5.10.y last year that has not been included in any release yet. The images we have up (from August?) do not include them and are very problematic.

The rework fixes a ton of problems and usually brings 5.10.y/current stability, apart from reducing the impact of N2 on the other G12's.

In the process, UHS speeds for SD were lost (they were implemented via vendor uboot 2015 hacks by HK), governor was set to performance.... all things that may have been fixed in latest versions of mainline u-boot; and Neil Armstrong has already pointed me to fixes for a bunch of things, so only more good things to come.

Some users have built from master or tried my unofficial images and feedback was pretty good. If only HK would support us somehow or at least work in a more mainline-oriented way on their own branches....

For next release I hope we can keep 5.10.y as current for some real users to try and after that I'll rework edge kernel to bring 5.15 / 5.16 goodness, uboot 2022.01 already is done by Igor, 100% mainline even for SPI boot (and even SATA boot on HC4).

Right now my N2 is "in production" and has 55 days uptime with 5.10.83-meson64 and is a beast; I'd accept a second one for development, although I'm focused on the HC4 now.

 

 

[rpardini]

13 minutes ago, rpardini said:

I did a big rework of current/5.10.y last year that has not been included in any release yet.

Oooh, it seems there's updated images from 23/Jan up at https://www.armbian.com/odroid-n2/ - but not sure what branch they're built from.

 

 

[AshieSlashy]

Hi @usual user - you said above that you were able to replace Petitboot by U-Boot in SPI.  I've been struggling to do that on an Odroid N2.  Are you able to provide any hints / suggestions / references on how to do that please?

 

[usual user]

2 hours ago, AshieSlashy said:

you were able to replace Petitboot by U-Boot in SPI.

There are several tools to write SPI flash. Choose whatever you're familiar with, e.g.:

dd if=u-boot-meson.bin of=/dev/mtd0

The tricky part is to wire the SPI flash up in devicetree. Hardkernel seems to have declared this information to be Top Secret. I extracted this information from Pettitboot, but I only got a very unstable functionality. It took me several tries before the data was error-free written, so I'm hesitant to publish my used values. Maybe there is someone out there who knows more reliably functioning binding values and can contribute them.

[AshieSlashy]

Ok, thanks anyway @usual user!