LAN/NIC problem

[pfeerick]

So longlseeps ubuntu image is the one that offers the best out-of-the-box experience/configuration.

Would not agree. Sure, the temperature fix didn't made it into the release yet, I don't wanted to poke Igor now (please keep in mind that we support +40 SBC and that there are important and less important things to be done before such a major release) but this will come the next days (just do the usual apt-get update/upgrade, everything in Armbian will be fixed that way, no scripts needed)

My apologies... I should have been clearer...  I was meaning of the ones offered by pine64!   If we were talking about the best linux image (so far!!   )  for the pine64 for headless use... I wouldn't argue there... Armbian is just perfect from what I have seen so far. And a little issue like the wrong temperature which is easily fixed until it is officially corrected is a non-issue!

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.

Well, wasn't planning on anything just yet, will be a few more days until I have some time to do redo videos I'd already done with some speed tests (unlisted as I'd already decided to redo them before I made them public). In the mean time, some other tests which we were talking about on the Armbian forum the other day are still worth mentioning.

Now anyone who has been following my attempts at getting some data on the sorts of performance you can expect to get from the pine64 (a Pine64+ 1GB) without having to have any exotic setups... even to the point where it is powered by c#$ppy power supplies, with un-optimised settings... where it can certainly work at 100T-ish speeds... (that's a measly 10MB/s)... simply to prove it doesn't need an exotic setup to make it really fly... but it certainly helps. So, this is a GbE board... so why didn't the network speeds fly? Well, on the pine64.pro debian image... I ran the network-tune script by longsleep, and got more like 30MB/s to the pine64, and 25MB/s from the pine (that's megabytes, not megabits!). Now, this was with a USB3 flash drive (I know, pine64 only has USB2 - but it's a higher speed drive than what the pine64 can max out on one port) in the lower usb port (so the true USB host port), and it was formatted with ExFAT (not the best for linux!). And this was transferring a 1GB video file from a SSD, on a desktop computer running Ubuntu. So... not the best settings, but with a minor tweak, it got some reasonable performance. And since it made no different in my setup whether it was 'dodgy' power or not, I've stuck with a battery for the remainder of the tests.

Now, tkasier said that I was to overcome the limitation of the USB controller, in order to try and push the GbE on the ethernet nearer to it's limits... I should try a btrfs filesystem, with compression on, and try transferring a 1GB file of zeros... which since it is zeros... should be pretty much a file the pine64 could instantly read, making it the GbE that would be bottleneck in the transfer. So, I tried that the other day, whilst armbian was loaded, and I was doing some other stuff with the pine64. Hence, I was on Windows this time (my desktop is dual-boot), so I need to try this again on ubuntu for consistency. However, the results were still telling. That 1GB file was now transferring at around 80MB/s in both directions. I also ran the HELIOS LanTest suite on the pine64, and got speeds in the order of 55MB/s+ in both directions (see the screenshots below for the stats). Conclusion... it may be a really, really nice NAS board once both USB ports can be used in RAID configuration at full speed. That is, for the ones with working GbE, that is... guess you guys all hate me now!    

Now, as tkaiser said over on the armbian forum... these numbers only indicate the transfers speeds on my particular network (which is nothing special - consumer grade cheapish networking equip - we're not talking CISCO enterprise grade stuff here) and isn't realistic as far as if it was used as a NAS - i.e. transferring lots of small files. As you can see from a later post over on the Armbian forum, with some more typical word and PDF docs... I got some good fast speeds for some 200-250MB data sets... but some really ugly speeds when transferring 2.1GB of data... including zillions of small text files..... that slowed things down a bit! However, since my primary use will be transferring audio and video files... I'm expecting some reasonable speeds from pine64!