LAN/NIC problem

[tkaiser]

someone on this forum said that due to bus speeds or something on these small board computers that I shouldn't expect to get GbE speeds and that Fast Ethernet is pretty close to the max I can expect? I guess that's not true?

Of course that's not true. At least for A64 used on Pine64+. GbE is connected through RGMII, both USB ports have an own PHY, memory bandwidth is high enough, CPU horsepower is high enough, the ONLY problem are shitty default settings on most of the OS images available for Pine64+. And the limiting factor here is USB 2.0 of course (keep that in mind when dealing with USB Ethernet dongles, the best you can get is maybe 300 Mbits/sec when using RTL8153 based dongles for ~$7.50) since network is faster than any single disk access.

Other platforms suffer from bus limitations (eg. all Raspberries which only have one single USB2 OTG port to the outside) or i.MX6 where the SoCs GbE maxes out at ~400 Mbits/sec (so while you can access disks with ~100 MB/s there you can't benefit that much from with NAS use cases). But with more recent Allwinner SoC's that's not the case. GbE with A64, H3 or A83T/H8 (all SoCs use almost identical implementation) is able to use full bandwidth. At Armbian we even support ARM devices using just a dual-core ARMv7 SoC being able to max out 3 SATA 3.0 lines in parallel while maxing out a few GbE connections: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...s/?p=15265

This won't be possible with A64 but since we already know from H3 devices running mainline kernel what's possible there (maxing out all 4 USB 2.0 ports there while also maxing out GbE -- H3 is just like A64 just with less USB ports and Cortex-A7 cores instead of Cortex-A53 as on Pine64+) 80 MB/s look realistic with a rather unrealistic RAID-0 implementation.