LAN/NIC problem

[tkaiser]

I wasn't so much referring to the GbE hardware issue that seems to be present, but more with the tuning issues for those who actually have working boards (as we've been discussing theoretical GbE limits and how different builds and settings can affect the real speeds people could get). But no point in discussing further since you explained here.

Just as information: @pfeerick did some tests today with Pine64+ and exceeded 80 MB/s after removing IO bottlenecks (just to show what's possible with A64's GbE implementation). I think he's currently preparing some stuff and will add it to this thread.

And on a related note: Mainline kernel (4.x) doesn't use the BSP kernel driver we're currently using with most OS images. Montjoie started to write a new driver from scratch (for H3 devices but since Ethernet implementation is almost the same as with A64 apritzel and our other linux-sunxi devs rely also on his driver).

Since I'm currently pineless and montjoie released v4 of his new Ethernet driver recently I gave it a try on a GbE equipped H3 device instead (the one I showed benchmark numbers before but with BSP kernel). Looked to good to be true (starting with 940 Mbits/sec but then the kernel paniced nicely and board restarted): http://pastebin.com/84zHgLc5

That's the nice thing with these Allwinner SoC similarities: montjoie codes on H3, I test on H3, others on A64, code review happens on our mailing list and when bugs are fixed by linux-sunxi community the code will work on Pine64/Pine64+ also. And at least the performance numbers I got look promising (especially since I forgot to patch u-boot and H3 was running with some weirdo low clockspeed).

In other words: It really looks promising for all those use cases where Pine64+ is a really nice device, benefitting from high GbE performance, virtualization and so on