Ok, Lion, thanks for showing that you do not want to understand. I do NOT pointed you to Armbian but to https://github.com/longsleep/build-pine64-image (just read what’s written above). This is NOT Armbian, this is one linux-sunxi dev who did a great work you could directly benefit from. I explained to you that you could take his work to improve your OS images. You don’t want to. You don’t want to even think about.
I explained to you that the settings you use for M2+ will lead to low benchmark scores and a lot of negative reviews (again: It’s not about Armbian, it’s the work of many linux-sunxi devs you ignore). You don’t want to even think about.
And that’s since you think about your customers only as people who BUY your hardware and not people who want to USE your hardware. And as long as this view doesn’t change, nothing on the software/settings side will change.
The way you develop your software (relying on old outdated code from Allwinner and blindly taking their unfavourable settings) implies that you have to deal with aging u-boot, an initrd, a FAT partition and a 2nd partition with the rootfs on it. I pointed you not to Armbian (since we do it completely different) but to a development toolchain that works the same way as you need it. By adopting this you could speed up creation and enhance quality of your OS images especially for the M3.
But you don’t even think about improving this. Thx for confirmation. Maybe you just don’t understand the importance of software/settings that make the difference between a paperweight and a development board? But since you don’t care it doesn’t matter that much.
i have ask mikey , he say ,we need finish all driver function test at first , when we finish this work , we will learn from your point. many code is above hardware.
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You weren’t kidding. Not even nano is installed, /etc/fstab is empty, and the Ubuntu port sources are downloading from .tw. These are just the first 3 things I stumpled upon, before pulling out my sdcard again for another format.
I know this says “beta” but this won’t do. And I’m pretty annoyed that I have to reinstall an image every time there’s a slight update to things.
I think I’ll stick to @tkaiser’s modified 15.04, even though 15.04 is EOL when it comes to support from Ubuntu. Perhaps a 15.10 image could be arranged if we all ask nicely, or maybe even a 16.04 LTS image could be arranged when it comes out on April 21st?
If not, then I guess I’ll end up buying an RPI3, and go back to having a USB hub running for the hard drive. This is not worth the hassle and the Welsh are just better at it.
You could try to build a community Xenial distro for M3. @bruberg seems experienced enough to help.
Using Armbian’s build system you could create a rootfs that can be combined with a freshly created image relying on Allwinner’s A83T BSP. If you follow Armbian’s instructions and by doing a
you get a whole image no one has tampered already. Then you would mount this image, edit and remove some stuff this way:
LOOP=$(losetup -f)
losetup $LOOP /path/to/Armbian.raw
partprobe $LOOP
mount ${LOOP}p1 /mnt/
(adjust the contents as outlined below) and then
umount /mnt/
losetup -d $LOOP
You would alter /mnt/etc/default/cpufrequtils to use 480/1800 MHz, create /mnt/root/.machine.id that it reads “Banana Pi M3”, remove /mnt/etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list (since Armbian’s kernel updates are useless and u-boot updates would destroy the bootloader) and also /mnt/boot and /mnt/lib/modules.
Then do a ‘cd /mnt && tar armbian_rootfs.tar *’, mount the 2nd partition of the M3 image, delete there everything except of boot/, lib/modules/ and lib/firmware/ and untar the created archive. Then you have an image that has never been booted, that will ask for a new root password on first boot, that will regenerate SSH keys on first boot (if you use any of SinoVoip’s OS images this doesn’t happen – think about if you connect your board to the internet ), that will resize the partition automagically on first boot, that redistributed IRQs accross CPU cores, that has armbianmonitor ready and so on.
It might even be possible to build an OS image with full HW acceleration. You will need probably some binary stuff for the PowerVR GPU you find in latest SinoVoip images and you might be able to benefit from hw accelerated video decoding through Cedrus/Vdpau since maybe the minimal support patch for A64 already ‘unlocks’ A83T (H3, A64 and A83T share the same IP here but maybe a different cedrus_get_ve_version version). In case you want to try it out better choose ‘BUILD_DESKTOP=yes’ above since then all of our accelerated armhf desktop packages become part of the image.
And in case you really look into it you could also teach SinoVoip how to produce an OS image that can be flashed through FEL mode. Simply combine the adjusted Armbian rootfs with these instructions: Build Livesuit Image for BPI-M3 to burn via phoneixsuit
Whole boot log (you can see automatic rootfs expansion and so on): http://sprunge.us/SXBE
While transferring this new semi Armbian image over SSH to burn it on eMMC I was reminded that SinoVoip chose to NOT fix this bug I reported ages ago so time to limit maximum clockspeed to 480 MHz (network transmissions break otherwise, it’s not the eMMC)
In case you try this with a Xenial rootfs please think about adjusting the paths to script.bin/uEnv.txt in u-boot scripts to point to /boot/ instead. Then you’re able to choose resolution (and also switch between HDMI/DVI) easily using h3disp afterwards.
No support, no guarantees, this is an ‘official’ image from SinoVoip not containing their latest AXP fixes with replaced Armbian 5.07 rootfs and the aforementioned tweaks. I would expect that no video/3D HW acceleration works but as headless server it should perform good.
Login with root/1234
You will then be asked to change the root pwd and to create a new user account. Many of the stuff outlined in our documentation applies to this rootfs: http://www.armbian.com/documentation/
But please keep in mind that this is not even 50% Armbian since kernel/u-boot are from M3 BSP and you get only normal Debian packages via online updates but not the most important parts. But as already said: The contained rootfs can be used to create a nice image (even from a security point of view if you forget how horrible Allwinner’s 3.4.39 kernel is and how many fixes are missing )
And then you can simply use bin2fex/fex2bin (contained in Armbian) to convert/modify script.bin (eg. fixy the ‘average load above 1’ problem or enable DVI displays, configure better throttling). The stuff can be found below /usr/lib/u-boot/bananapi/bpi-m3/linux/ and needs a reboot after modifications.
And again: Of course it doesn’t work this way: There’s a syntax error that prevents loading the correct script.bin (reported back 6 weeks ago but as usual @sinovoip doesn’t give a shit) and the whole stuff has to be copied onto the first partition since they try to read from there.
Therefore:
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/ cp -rp /usr/lib/u-boot/bananapi/bpi-m3 /mnt/bananapi/
Then fix the 8th line in /mnt/bananapi/bpi-m3/linux/uEnv.txt so that it reads ‘script=script.bin’ and make adjustments to /mnt/bananapi/bpi-m3/linux/script.bin instead. After a reboot it should finally work.
However, I decided to give it a retry and use a 64bit VirtualBox instead. I got a little further this time, but I’m stuck on these errors:
[ o.k. ] Creating board support package [ orangepih3 ] [ o.k. ] Fingerprinting [ Armbian 5.07 Orangepih3 Ubuntu xenial default Linux ] [ o.k. ] Building package [ linux-xenial-root-orangepih3 ] [ o.k. ] Starting build process for [ orangepih3 xenial ] [ o.k. ] Creating new rootfs for [ xenial ] [ o.k. ] Installing base system [ Stage 1/2 ] I: Retrieving Release I: Retrieving Release.gpg I: Checking Release signature I: Valid Release signature (key id 790BC7277767219C42C86F933B4FE6ACC0B21F32) I: Retrieving Packages I: Validating Packages I: Found packages in base already in required: locales I: Resolving dependencies of required packages... I: Resolving dependencies of base packages... I: Checking component main on http://localhost:3142/ports.ubuntu.com... E: Couldn't find these debs: debconf-utils [ error ] ERROR in function create_rootfs_cache [ debootstrap-ng.sh:173 ] [ error ] Debootstrap base system first stage failed [ o.k. ] Process terminated [ error ] ERROR in function unmount_on_exit [ debootstrap-ng.sh:559 ] [ error ] debootstrap-ng was interrupted [ o.k. ] Process terminated
I’ve installed debconf-utils via apt-get, but something tells me that’s not the solution. Is it because localhost:3142/port.ubuntu.com (and thus Xenial) doesn’t have debconf-utils?
and try again. BTW: In /usr/local/bin/sun8i-corekeeper.sh this should be adjusted (since A83T is octa core and since Armbian doesn’t support the M3 we install this for the quad core H3 only)
BTW: I ran some benchmarks on this Armbian/SinoVoip hybrid with Armbian’s THS, dvfs and cooler_table settings. First runs seemed 30% faster compared to Raspbian 8.0.
Unfortunately all PSUs with this connector were already in use so I switched back to powering through Micro USB. Now the board freezes somehow under heavy load when consumption exceeds 9W. Not really an improvement but at least different to back then. I still wonder whether it’s possible to power the M3 through GPIO pins. At least the ‘documentation’ doesn’t mention it.
So always ensure you avoid Micro USB if you want to run heavy workloads on the M3. And I won’t test further since it’s useless anyway
I ran into a few minor errors while installing the base system, where some packages wouldn’t be installed. But I managed to force it with apt-get -f in debootstrap-ng.sh, and it worked fine.
Worth a mention is, that it failed to install two packages, but debootstrap.log doesn’t mention which ones, and I can’t remember. No worries, it will probably just make my M3 explode
Now, for the “mount the 2nd image of the M3 image”-part. Can I use your Semi_Armbian image instead of compiling a whole new image from SinoVoip (and possibly ruin the process because of Murphy’s Law)?
Sure can you use it. But be aware that the installation of SinoVoip’s .debs still has to happen after the first boot (hard to automate since they constantly refuse to do it right or just to look how everyone else does it) and you should add /dev/mmcblk0p1 as /boot to /etc/fstab (just search inside’s Armbian’s lib dir how a correct entry would look like) when manipulating the base image. And also /etc/hostname should be changed (will read now orangepih3 in your case).
Sorry lionwang but he is the only person here who is helpfull with M3, your company did NOT even post correct images ever since… You can ban me if you wish, but I will never buy anything from you again! M3 was a mistake… M1+ is great but again only because it is supported by community… I had found more resources there than on your pages…
But hey I love M3, as a geek I have really cool paperweight
In fact unlike these pages here you find correct informations about Bananas ONLY on the linux-sunxi community pages: http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page
It’s now the fourth time I write this in threads that are read by @noralee, @projectbananapi, @sinovoip and @lionwang that they still provide wrong information regarding the newest Banana: M2+ has not two but one led and doesn’t support CAN bus. What do they? Simply giving a shit. They do not even correct such easy to fix mistakes: http://www.banana-pi.org/m2plus.html (still wrong, they only corrected the other obvious mistake and now M2+ is 65x65mm and not 55x55mm in size any longer)
It is more like none of us are trying and double checking information. I will go correct the specs again.
We should have a place on our forum dedicated to website mistakes. That will make corrections faster.
After installing those 3 debs and correcting a smaller error I had made in /etc/fstab, it’s now running flawlessly. Thanks for all the help and tips. I’ll be sure to save this page as a reference for future builds, as I have no intention of doing this once. However, the building process will be a wee bit different now that SinoVoip have finally made steps towards upgrading the ancient-as-f*ck u-boot?
), that will resize the partition automagically on first boot, that redistributed IRQs accross CPU cores, that has armbianmonitor ready and so on.
