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Comment by trome | Hacker News Reader

This kernel brings nearly full support (excluding Mali support) for Allwinner H3 based boards, and adds A64 support. I compiled 4.10-rc6 for my OrangePi a few days ago, and HDMI, audio, NAND flash, gigabit, wifi and everything else I tested worked well.

Finally got a super cheap version of a BeagleBone Black with the OrangePi Zero ($7), and with the OrangePi PC+ you get a board with a gig of ram and 8GB of fast eMMC for under $20.

Hopefully the H5 based boards and Arm64 in general will get better support, been having trouble getting NodeJS 6 or 7 running on aarch64 short of compiling it myself :(

Edit: Also FriendlyARM has a couple fun H3 based boards with the Nanopi Neo and a few others, might wanna look at those too!

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Nice to see Orange Pi PC being mentioned. It really is such a nice board. BTW, Armbian has experimental "mainline+patches" support for Orange Pi PC2, have you tried that?

Yeah, I have a few OrangePi PC2 boards that I built a kernel 4.10-rc6 image for, they seem to work fine (tho no working HDMI in my build) though I need to test them more. I'm planning to use them for a Ceph cluster, with four JMS567 USB 3.0 to SATA bridges ($2ea) on each SBC.

I figure with 160MB/s of I/O and gigabit ethernet, it'll be able to push files at a decent clip, dunno if it will max out my gig internet though.

Is this a good option?

https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/NEW-orange-pi-plus-...

Where could I find more info about these?

Update: Google to the rescue http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiplus2/

DO NOT BUY THAT!!!! Get an OrangePi+ 2e, Xunlong released the OrangePi+ 2 and it has a USB Hub unlike other OrangePis (where you'd have 4x USB ports direct wired into the SOC, each can do 40MB/s) and a few other design compromises that make the OrangePi+ 2 a bad buy.

The Armbian people bitched at Xunlong for making such a terrible board and Xunlong replaced it with the OrangePi+ 2e, which is much better.

The power supply they offer is also pretty decent, so I'd nab it with that: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-Pi-Plus-2e-SET4-Pi-Pl...

Does the new OrangePi PC2+ have this like the OrangePi+ 2e you mention? I was thinking about it since it also reportedly supports h265 10bit.

The OrangePi PC2 has directly wired USB ports for all four ports (3 normal USB, 1 microUSB OTG, same as Opi PC), but as far as everyone says, there is no 10 bit support for the H3 or H5. 8 bit works though :P

https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1762-new-oranges-w...

>adds A64 support

A64 as in the chip that sits on the Pine64? I happen to have a Pine64 model PA642GB (aka PINE A64+ 2GB), which I bought after reading a comment on HN. After I received it I learned that the Linux support was actually terrible so I put it aside and haven't touched it since. Perhaps the situation is better now then?

Go grab Armbian for your Pine64, its the least worst thing you can put on it. The Pine64 itself is a terrible board, its limited to 1 USB port, the light on it doesn't tell the user whether the OS actually booted, and the microUSB connector allows people to use crap cables that don't provide enough power for it to boot, but provide enough power for the stupid LED to come on.

You could likely build a working image running kernel 4.10, Armbian has a build system for that or you can just use qemu-debootstrap.

https://www.armbian.com/pine64/

This is fantastic. I'd love to see more people in the "low-power" computer space. It's a nice constraint that isn't actually so tight that you can't do cool things. I'm pretty sure you could make use of these systems as a complete desktop which would be great: an entirely silent solid state system.

Yeah, if you look beyond the Raspberry Pi there are quite a few options, just things to keep an eye on are:

- MicroUSB for power - limits you to 2A, very bad

- Crap/slow eMMC - Look at random I/O as main method of judgment

- USB Hubs where they shouldn't be needed - OrangePi+ 2 made this mistake, get OrangePi+ 2e instead

- Poor board thermals - a good SBC will have a copper layer below the SOC to spread the heat across the PCB

- Non-mainline support - It might be great hardware, but its a dud without software

- Bad Power Supply - A phone charger is not a SBC power supply

- Slow MicroSD - Buy Samsung Evo 32GB cards, test immediately. Even with a good brand like these, 2 out of every 5 won't even do 10MB/s of write, or 2MB/s of random I/O, making them not a class 10 card. Exchange the bad ones, buy used if your on a budget.

> Slow MicroSD - Buy Samsung Evo 32GB, test immediately

Aren't there a lot of counterfeits that's why?

Eh, that is only part of it, my comments were referring to genuine MicroSD cards, essentially Samsung's Evo cards are made using flash from their semiconductor fabs, and tend to have higher quality over Sandisk and basically all others since they buy random lots of flash off the open market.

That being said, Samsung isn't performance testing each microsd card, so you need to bench them ASAP when you get them to make sure your getting above 2MB/s in random I/O and around 20MB/s in write speed. If they fail that test (which if your buying more than one, you'll run across), just get it exchanged with the seller, no reason to hang onto a poorly performing card.

> Poor board thermals - a good SBC will have a copper layer below the SOC to spread the heat across the PCB

If that's the only thing wrong you can buy a few chip heat sinks and set it in a thermal epoxy to turn the entire thing into a thermally massive block. Even crap air flow should clean that up and then you don't need a case. You can also thermal glue it to a large bit of metal if you have a metal desk or something

That is both added cost and your still missing cooling the underside of the SOC. Most people will not take steps like that, so you end up with boards clocked at 900mhz instead of 1200mhz cause groups like Armbian don't want to burn up the SOC on users boards that don't have a heatsink.

Other bad moves are dumping 1.3v or 1.4v into the SOC and not allowing the user to adjust that voltage, cause then the board is just generating heat needlessly instead of running at 1.1v or so.

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