First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com) [LWN.net]

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 8:06 UTC (Tue) by solenskiner (guest, #67077) [Link] (4 responses)

hows mainline support?

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 8:41 UTC (Tue) by solenskiner (guest, #67077) [Link] (3 responses)

Not great, it seems https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Ma...

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 9:29 UTC (Tue) by shalem (subscriber, #4062) [Link] (2 responses)

Hi,

Upstream u-boot Allwinner SoC support maintainer here. Mainline support for the A64 SoC is coming along slowly but certainly. There are patch-sets floating around / being made ready for merging both for the kernel and for u-boot. I hope we will have (some) support soonish. At least basic support for booting Linux, using all 4 cores, serial ports, mmc, USB and ethernet.

Note this board does not have an A64, but rather rather a H5 which is a different SoC, but likely (hopefully) not that different. Still no promises on how long it will take to get H5 support upstream.

Regards,

Hans

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 18:11 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

This is great news! It changes my somewhat bleak opinion of the Orange boards.

Two questions: is there a place where this work is ongoing? (I understand that NDAs mean that most communication must be kept private, but is there a blog or issue tracker or something?) And is the work being sponsored?

Good luck! I'm excited to see what happens.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 19:06 UTC (Tue) by shalem (subscriber, #4062) [Link]

Hi,

The work is happening on the relevant mailinglists (u-boot devel list, various kernel lists) and no this is not being sponsored, this is all community work.

Regards,

Hans

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 10:29 UTC (Tue) by bytelicker (guest, #92320) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes they are cheap but their hardware has a high fault-rate. Hardware support is there but the software support is crappy at best. Allwinners SoC's pretty much have zero support in the open source community. No mainline support. They use old kernels. You will be running old kernels and graphics drivers. Also... the old Orange Pi SoC got notoriously hot. 60-75 degrees celcius. You needed an active cooler or very big passive one. Lets not forget the ridiculous patched kernel by Allwinner. They forgot to remove their "debug" code which basically allowed total control over devices shipped with the kernel; http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1108-security-alert...
I'd be very wary about using this SBC. Sure it's fine for fiddling around. You're better of with ODroid.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 16:17 UTC (Tue) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

>Yes they are cheap but their hardware has a high fault-rate.

Do you have a source for this?

>Allwinners SoC's pretty much have zero support in the open source community. No mainline support. They use old kernels.

Excuse me? Take, for example, the A20. All essential features have been upstreamed quite some time ago. My A20 board runs a recent, unpatched kernel.

> You're better of with ODroid.

Last time I checked, the ODroid C2 is still running kernel 3.14, and upstreaming is not exactly proceeding at warp speed.

http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=135&t=22717

There might be a multitude of problems with Allwinner, like GPL compliance problems, upstreaming could be faster, documentation better. But there are similar problems with every platform.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 9, 2016 14:04 UTC (Wed) by bytelicker (guest, #92320) [Link]

>Do you have a source for this?
Not really. I just remember some people on AliExpress and various established forums reporting having received faulty units. Either they were faulty on arrival or the units stopped working after some weeks.

>Excuse me? Take, for example, the A20. All essential features have been upstreamed quite some time ago. My A20 board runs a recent, unpatched kernel.
The story is different with Allwinner H3 and (new one in this article) H5 series; https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Ma...

>Last time I checked, the ODroid C2 is still running kernel 3.14, and upstreaming is not exactly proceeding at warp speed.
True. The community is just much better.

It may be that things are better now. When I was looking at the Orange Pi One it didn't look too good though.

Let's hope for things to improve.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 19:29 UTC (Tue) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (1 responses)

So the biggest benefit of the Raspberry Pi may be the community around it--much stronger community for documentation and support from standard GNU/Linux distrubutions--Fedora, Ubuntu, the latest versions, all running on the Raspberry Pi

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 9, 2016 8:32 UTC (Wed) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link]

I will gladly pay the $15 difference for a Raspberry Pi, and save me lot's of time because of that userbase support.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 15:39 UTC (Tue) by rriggs (guest, #11598) [Link] (12 responses)

I find those oddly angled chips and lack of any balance or symmetry on the PCB visually disturbing. Whether the board works or not, it's just too ugly.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 16:03 UTC (Tue) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (5 responses)

when do we begin to have beauty pagents on circuit layout?

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 17:21 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

Symmetry is important. Biological "fitness" is based very heavily on this - a baby that has a good start in the womb will have symmetrical appearance. That's why we equate symmetry with beauty. And why we like beautiful things.

An experiment ages back took photos of normal peoples' faces, and "beauty"s faces. They then replaced the right half with a mirror image of the left. For people deemed beautiful, the result was still recognizably them. For most people, the resulting image was hard to recognise.

Cheers,
Wol

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 18:14 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

So... There's... Um. I should try to make my boards look more like baby faces?

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 9, 2016 17:45 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (2 responses)

> Symmetry is important. Biological "fitness" is based very heavily on this - a baby that has a good start in the womb will have symmetrical appearance. That's why we equate symmetry with beauty. And why we like beautiful things.

That is not entirely true. Studies in which a halve face have been mirrored to be entirely symmetric have led to being evaluated as "creepy" by people. The Golden ratio is being seen as beautiful, not necessarily the symmetric arrangement of things. It is true that symmetry has elements of beauty, but so has asymetry.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 10, 2016 1:07 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

Beyond the half-photo study there have been numerous others using mathematical evaluations of facial symmetry and those found that people identified as "beautiful" had high degrees of symmetry, often significantly higher than the general population average. In fact those considered the most beautiful people on the planet were 99% or more symmetric. These were statistically significant studies with very high confidence levels. There is some innate genetic instinct in humans that favors symmetry for purposes of fitness.

It's entirely human nature to prefer symmetry, even in inanimate objects. It may not be entirely logical when evaluating a circuit board but instincts like this don't care if it's logical.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 10, 2016 8:00 UTC (Thu) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

But where exactly is the symmetry in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#/media/File:Ra... that is missing in the Orange Pi?

The only difference I see is the number of parallel lines. Especially the borders of the chips and the borders of the board.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 16:10 UTC (Tue) by Tara_Li (guest, #26706) [Link] (5 responses)

The question then arises - why do we have such oddly placed components? I doubt they did it just to screw around with people - does it have advantages that outweigh the aesthetic issues?

I mean - if I found out that my computer ran 20% faster if I turned it 37.3degrees away from true north, I wouldn't care WHY - I'll leave that for the physicists. And if it works, I'm not going to give a plugged nickel for the physicist whining "but it can't!!!!" Reality trumps theory, EVERY SINGLE TIME.

I doubt the designers just tossed the components out at random, and said "Hey, let's just wire them up this way." Pretty much had to be some reason - find out why.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 16:53 UTC (Tue) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link] (4 responses)

Traces for the DDR chips need to be within tight tolerances to achieve fastest bandwidths. If it's not that, it's just how they've squeezed all the chips onto this small board without paying for multiple layers of circuit traces.

K3n.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 18:23 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm guessing someone has a new autoplace/autorouter that isn't constrained to 45 degree grids.

You're right, things get funky when the board gets small. Especially if you only have 4 or 6 layers. But this board doesn't look that small! And it's barely populated on the backside.

Actually, I kinda like the backside... it's like those bypass caps are getting sucked into a black hole.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 18:32 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Or, how similar is the periphery to the old board? Maybe someone took the old design, replaced the SoC packages, and just push&shoved until the new stuff barely fit.

Either way, the answer is probably the same: Laziness! 9Maybe the good Perl kind or maybe the quick careless kind. Dunno.)

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 23:13 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link]

>I'm guessing someone has a new autoplace/autorouter that isn't constrained to 45 degree grids.

Well why stop there, let's abolish rectangular ICs at once. Heat spreads in circles anyway (yesyes, spheres, but ICs are still comparatively flat).

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 14, 2016 13:49 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>If it's not that, it's just how they've squeezed all the chips onto this small board without paying for multiple layers of circuit traces.

Yeah, I can't see how they could have possibly routed the connections from those RAM chips to the SoC without another layer if they were perpendicular - even if they mounted them on the back, which would make the board harder to manufacture. It might have been doable at 45 degrees, but it's still harder to route when you start adding restrictions like that, and where's the benefit?

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 8, 2016 15:39 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (3 responses)

I'm surprised at how deeply offended I am by the non-perpendicular alignment of chips on that board. The older Orange Pi PC has one chip at 45 degrees, which I can just about accept - at least it has some symmetry - but the angles on the Orange Pi PC 2 are unbearable.

I'll admit there are worse things happening in the world, but this is pretty close behind them.

de gustibus

Posted Nov 9, 2016 1:25 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

I was immediately charmed by the off-kilter placement.

de gustibus

Posted Nov 9, 2016 12:45 UTC (Wed) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (1 responses)

Uh. Thanks $DEITY I'm not alone. I was starting to feel kinda... weird :-)

And to those talking about symmetry: yes, but have a look at the human heart: it's asymmetrical in a very disconcerting way :-)

de gustibus

Posted Nov 9, 2016 13:38 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

Human hearts are normally kept out of sight, unless something has gone very badly wrong with the body, in which case the asymmetry of the heart is one of the less disconcerting things you'll see.

In contrast the Orange Pi doesn't come with a case, and the most common cases are transparent, so its egregious deformities are impossible to miss.

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 9, 2016 1:26 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

It looks, on first impression, as if the LIMA video driver hasn't been worked on for four years. Is it dead?

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 (HackerBoards.com)

Posted Nov 9, 2016 10:15 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

Seems so - this blog post indicates the main developer has not been having a very happy time with Lima since 2013 and is unlikely to want to resume working on it.