Stefan Monnier wrote:

I'm using a cubietruck (Allwinner A20 with dual A7 cores). Works well as well, though it's clearly less powerful cpu-wise. I liked its SATA support better than the Wandboard's (basically, it provides 2'5" SATA power as well, so you avoid the need for an external power supply).

MMM, personally I just grabbed a 5V 3A power brick from the junk box and added a SATA power connector so it could run both board and drive. Runs fine though the PSU does get rather hot (I suspect this is because it's not a very high quality PSU)

But I could see it being a pain for those who can't solder.

On 06/06/2014 14:08, Stefan Monnier wrote:

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Looking for another ARM device to assist in software builds, has anybody got any recommendations for a capable board/device available in the UK?

I like the wandboard quad myself, able to run debian armmp kernels, seems to be reasonablly stable (i've been running the autobuilders for raspbian jessie on them for a while with only occasional crashes which I half suspect are due to my use of btrfs), has an a9 quad core processor, 2GB ram, SATA

I'm using a cubietruck (Allwinner A20 with dual A7 cores). Works well as well, though it's clearly less powerful cpu-wise. I liked its SATA support better than the Wandboard's (basically, it provides 2'5" SATA power as well, so you avoid the need for an external power supply).

The mainline Linux kernel support for cubietruck is not great but is sufficient for sever-style uses (no video, no audio, no OTG).

Have used cubietruck, seems to struggle with swapping, badly.

As you say, mainline support is not good and is obviously part of the swapping issue I experienced. Maybe if I could get swap set up properly on it it would do the business as the spec implies it should.

Cheers, Mike.

On 07/06/2014 03:34, Stefan Monnier wrote:

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Have used cubietruck, seems to struggle with swapping, badly.

Hmm... haven't had any such problem.

On one particular cmake build it hits 99% memory usage immediately, then eats up all the sway you throw at it and eventually gives up :) Not all the cubietrucks fault no doubt.

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As you say, mainline support is not good and is obviously part of the swapping issue I experienced.

I've had some trouble with the gigabit ethernet (solved by forcing it back to 100Mb/s), but other than that what's supported worked well. The "not great" was more about the lack of support of various elements (e.g. nand flash, OTG, audio, video, wifi) rather than the quality of that which is supported.

Yes, the gig ethernet is dire but the cubie truck is no alone there. I found no problem with the video (vga & hdmi) or audio but those are not that much of interest for the task in hand.

Cheers, Mike.

On 10/06/2014 02:05, Stefan Monnier wrote:

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I found no problem with the video (vga & hdmi) or audio but those are not that much of interest for the task in hand.

Then you didn't use the mainstream kernel, since they're 100% not working there ;-)

That's correct, I didn't. As you say, support is sadly lacking.

ian's committing debian-installer support soon for a number of devices. the cubietruck is one of them. sata already in, sdcard next.

The vanilla kernel already supports sata, usb, ethernet, and sdcard, and in my experience these work very well (actually, I haven't tried the ethernet with the vanilla kernel, the problems I had with Gbit ethernet were with the 3.4 kernel).

There's further code available (in the process of being merged) for NAND, IR, and a few more things.

OTOH if you need something like audio/video/OTG, you need to use the sunxi-3.4 kernel which uses a fairly different codebase (uses Allwinner's own replacement for device-tree, for example).

Stefan

On 06/06/2014 12:27, peter green wrote:

Michael Howard wrote:

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Looking for another ARM device to assist in software builds, has anybody got any recommendations for a capable board/device available in the UK?

I like the wandboard quad myself, able to run debian armmp kernels, seems to be reasonablly stable (i've been running the autobuilders for raspbian jessie on them for a while with only occasional crashes which I half suspect are due to my use of btrfs), has an a9 quad core processor, 2GB ram, SATA and serial console (full RS232 levels too so no need to mess arround with level shifters). I'm not aware of any UK stockists but mouser ship quickly and handle all the VAT/customs BS from their end so there are no nasty financial surprises on delivery.

Well I did give the Wandboard Quad a shot (unfortuantely). Not impressed I'm afraid to say.

Sound support sucks badly (except for hdmi which at least works, but of no real use to me), they are flakey (heat issues?) , tried two of them actually. I could live with the heat issue but not the lack of audio for my current project.

Mouser on the other hand did as you say deal with all the import crap, they were excellent, very prompt too (amazingly prompt in fact).

I guess I'll ebay em and look for somethin else.

On 21/06/2014 15:57, peter green wrote:

Michael Howard wrote:

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Well I did give the Wandboard Quad a shot (unfortuantely). Not impressed I'm afraid to say.

Sound support sucks badly (except for hdmi which at least works, but of no real use to me), they are flakey (heat issues?) , tried two of them actually. I could live with the heat issue but not the lack of audio for my current project.

Sorry I should have been clearer, when I said I liked them I meant I liked them as build boxes. I haven't tested them in other contexts so I cant comment on the behaviour of hardware outside that used on a build box. I have heard the IMX makes a lot more heat if you start pushing the GPU than it does in CPU bound tasks.

No need to be sorry, I asked for opinion and you gave it, for that I'm grateful. Furthermore, my question was aimed at build boxes and I'm sure I'll use them for that if the ebay monster doen't get them first.

The flakiness appears under general heay build workload scenario, outside of a case. With a usb fan directly applied things improved significantly.

Cheers, Mike