I tried all 4 available OS images from the download page but to no avail. When flashing Android to eMMC I get a system with one active CPU core and where I can’t do anything useful (I want to test an SBC and don’t fiddle around with an Android toy).
All 3 Linux images are corrupted according to “unzip” (I extracted the images using TheUnarchiver that didn’t complain) and since SinoVoip doesn’t provide at least MD5/SHA1 checksums to check download integrity I’m a bit stuck now.
EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p2): bad geometry: block count 1854464 exceeds size of device (1849344 blocks)
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(179,2)
And Raspbian finds a rootfs but fails a bit later:
VFS: Mounted root (ext4 filesystem) on device 179:2
Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 0000b950
@sinovoip: when will you provide an OS image containing the latest hardware initialisation fixes from Github, that is known to work and with MD5/SHA1 checksum to verify download integrity?
Seems I’ve been wrong in many regards. The A83T is really fast and with an applied heatsink climbs up to 1.6 GHz (and with improved cooling it should be possible to reach even higher clockspeeds without any overvolting/overclocking, just by preventing thermal throttling from jumping in).
Just a first small impression using
sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run --num-threads=8
7za b
mbw -t0 256 && mbw -t1 256 && mbw -t2 256
for small integer and memory performance measurements: sysbench 66.9 seconds, 7-zip score 5014, memory bandwidth: 501.7, 448.4, 518.4 MiB/s
That’s not only twice as fast as the few quad-core SoCs I’ve tested, the A83T remained ‘cool’ due to throttling at approx. 75-80°C so there’s a lot of room for improvement. As a reference a few other SoCs I ran the same benchmarks on: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/311-quick-review-of-lemakers-guitar/
USB-to-SATA throughput depends on cpufreq settings (13/23 MB/s @ 480 MHz vs 15/30 MB/s @1800 MHz write/read – even the last value is really bad compared to good USB-to-SATA implementations) and the thermal stuff is quite interesting. Without active cooling you’re far away from being able to run the A83T above 1.2/1.6 GHz over a minute. But with a good heatsink applied the A83T is able to perform really fast over short periods of time (until throttling jumps in and reduces cpufreq or drops cores)
Since still only broken OS images are available here http://www.banana-pi.org/download.html and according to the commit log above they started just recently to fix basic stuff like wrong DRAM initialisation, LEDs, BT and so on I would suspect we’ve to a wait a few weeks until software left alpha state.
Quite unimpressive. The magic happens somewhere else: bootloader, kernel and hardware initialisation. And there we have to rely on you: https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/BPI-M3-bsp/commits/master (these fixes are important not the result of a ‘do-release-upgrade’ call)
Well, you got your image working, @lionwang updated github so that the LED is blinking.
What else do you need - it is blinking and runs.
This is a developer-board, not for production.
If the intention is production, then in the last couple weeks before release you would have seen commits on
github.
