Networking unstable on PineCube with Armbian?

[hackkitten]

Hello all,

For a client project I have obtained two PineCube units and have tried to set them up with Armbian, but regardless of the SBC I see the same issue. After starting a download of a larger (multiple MB) file from a HTTPS server (Git repository), the system becomes unresponsive and has to be hard reset.

* I used two different PineCube units.
* I used a known good SD card (pulled from a working Raspberry Pi 3B system).
* I used different USB cables and chargers (also used with Raspberry Pi & Odroid systems previously).
* I used Ethernet and WiFi (separately) with identical results.
* I used the Focal Armbian version, then the Buster version, with identical results.

Does anyone have stable Ethernet/WiFi on PineCube with Armbian, or is this considered to be an unstable feature? The PineCube wiki seems to hint at this being still experimental.

[hackkitten]

Update:

Turns out the system doesn't crash. It just gets so slow that updates via the ssh session are measured in minutes instead of milliseconds. At some point the task (git http clone) fails due to a time-out on the HTTPS connection.

From another ssh session I can see that during the git HTTP activity the RAM and swap get hammered before the ssh daemon gets starved and stops updating. Last top output before freeze: 71.8% CPU for NetworkManager, 54.6% for systemd-journal and 54.1% for git-remote-http. Average load is well above 10.

I guess this means that using git on one of these systems is a big nope.