Pi2 Server Comparison - Rough

[rahlquist]

Regarding the PIs all have just 100Mbits and my Pine at the moment also only works with a port speed of 100Mbits, there seems to be no need for me to switch from PI to Pine, as im getting about 10-11MBytes transfer rates which is caused by the network speed. So no need for the optimization at the moment, right?

Right, but I'm wondering why your Pine64 only negotiates with Fast Ethernet? Both my 2 Pine64+ worked flawlessly with various GbE capable switches and throughput was above 500 Mbits/sec in both directions tested against a MacBook that is known to exceed 940 Mbits/sec.

In the meantime I focussed a lot on H3 (A64's ARMv7 sibling known from the Orange Pis) and there we got a working Ethernet mainline kernel driver in the meantime thanks to the hard work of the linux-sunxi community and we were able to get ~460 MBits/sec in both directions simultaneously. So while this is okish and not that great it also means the issue will be resolved sooner or later since the Ethernet IP block in H3 and A64 (and A83T) seems to be the same (and the two boards we tested with -- Orange Pi Plus and Banana Pi M2+ -- also use the RTL8211E PHY as used with Pine64+).

To be honest: the Ethernet driver from Allwinner's BSP is crap. Not only the integer overflow that crashed the 2GB boards in the beginning is a good sign for that, the driver also is known to break whole protocol families (like AppleTalk -- the older might know what that is ) 

In other words: Mainlining effort is progressing nicely and Pine64 will get better/faster over time due to better kernel/drivers

I believe you mentioned that in the past the H3 suffered the same lack of HDMI compatibility. Is there any info you can share from that with the folks working with linux on Pine and Allwinner's BSP that would help to expand compatibility to other HDMI devices?