Armbian already running on Banana Pi M2+

Thx for sending a M2+ developer sample. Arrived 6 hours ago. I created the linux-sunxi wiki page for the device and already ported Armbian to it:

http://linux-sunxi.org/Sinovoip_Banana_Pi_M2%2B#OS_images

Important: Since the M2+ is more or less an exact clone of Orange Pi Plus (everything identical to OPi Plus except of missing USB hub, missing crappy USB-to-SATA bridge and different WiFi/BT chipset) Armbian will support this board unlike M3. In case SinoVoip will ever host here an Armbian image: do not use it, it’s just a fake/rip-off like the so called Armbian image they provide for the M3 here.

Also important: the M2+ has serious thermal problems since SinoVoip doesn’t use a programmable voltage regulator therefore the H3 SoC will always be fed with 1.3V. When running demanding workloads due to this rather high voltage even when downclocking to 648MHz the SoC’s temperature might exceed 90°C without a heatsink. So be prepared that the M2+ will be pretty slow due to this design flaw. A better choice is any of the Xunlong H3 devices since they support different voltages and reduce VDD_CPUX when running on lower clockspeeds.

In Armbian we now allow downclocking to 240 MHz for the M2+ and implemented a corekeeper service bringing back killed CPU cores since when running really heavy workloads you end up rather quickly with a single core system since the 3.4 kernel used now kills CPU cores as a last resort when throttling doesn’t help. The settings you use are rather strange since most users will almost all the time run a single core board.

Stay tuned, within the next days a short review will appear in Armbian forums… in the meantime we try to get kernel 4.6 up and running on the board (since it’s nearly identical to Orange Pi Plus it’s just a matter of adjusting a few settings since all the work is already done by linux-sunxi community)

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Fast work,i will try soon Armbian,on opi pc working very slow than Lubuntu

Last armbian working very good,same on opi pc and on m2+,i tested quake 3 ,same performance on 1200Mhz,finaly chromium is usable for internet browsing.Thanks.