Although the RockPro64 has great specs in theory, it is often not usable for real applications because of the current state of software support.
First problem: USB3. No matter which kernel I've tried to use on my RockPro64 (Ayufan's 4.20, 5.0 as well as Armbian's 4.4.174 which is supposed to be directly based on Pine64's patches), there is no way to do any serious usage of USB3 storage. With all the dev. kernels, I end up with massive filesystem corruption after transferring a few Gb of data in/out of USB3. With kernel 4.4, transferring a few Gb of data leads to kernel crash. I can do some benchmarks (with hdparm for example), but not serious usage. My usb storage is a Samsung SSD connected through a JMicron JMS567 bridge (with Hardkernel's latest firmware), so this is very similar to the USB3/sata adapter sold by Pine64. Of course, the whole thing works very well on my laptop (running Debian Buster) where it can transfer 100's of Gb without a sweat. I've tried other USB cables, I've tried a laptop power supply (that can provide up to 6A), nothing can make the RockPro64's USB3 stable.
For mainline kernels (even with a thick layer of additional patches), several other major issues remain: there is no HDMI output (so if you're out of luck, your system is not connecting to the network and you don't have an easy way to check what it is doing on a connected screen). There is no proper handling of the big.little clusters (so the processes get distributed more or less randomly, leading to unsatisfying performance, see this previous post). There is no support for the DDR4 memory, it is handled as ddr3. The eMMC is handled as HS-200 instead of HS-400 (so less speed, see FreeBSD post and it is far from stellar anyway). The SPI memory seems to be half-buggy, half-slow (see lkml). The U-boot is still relying on an older version (from 2017) because of difficulties in making it work with the current mainline (see this post). There are some reports of problems with using the PCIe (see this thread ). Half of the time, the board does not reboot but gets stuck when shutting down.
I am wondering if somebody at Pine64 works with the community to help fix these problems... (this is not supposed to be mean, but a genuine question: is the community left by to fight by itself or is there some support from Pine64).
Mathias
First problem: USB3. No matter which kernel I've tried to use on my RockPro64 (Ayufan's 4.20, 5.0 as well as Armbian's 4.4.174 which is supposed to be directly based on Pine64's patches), there is no way to do any serious usage of USB3 storage. With all the dev. kernels, I end up with massive filesystem corruption after transferring a few Gb of data in/out of USB3. With kernel 4.4, transferring a few Gb of data leads to kernel crash. I can do some benchmarks (with hdparm for example), but not serious usage. My usb storage is a Samsung SSD connected through a JMicron JMS567 bridge (with Hardkernel's latest firmware), so this is very similar to the USB3/sata adapter sold by Pine64. Of course, the whole thing works very well on my laptop (running Debian Buster) where it can transfer 100's of Gb without a sweat. I've tried other USB cables, I've tried a laptop power supply (that can provide up to 6A), nothing can make the RockPro64's USB3 stable.
For mainline kernels (even with a thick layer of additional patches), several other major issues remain: there is no HDMI output (so if you're out of luck, your system is not connecting to the network and you don't have an easy way to check what it is doing on a connected screen). There is no proper handling of the big.little clusters (so the processes get distributed more or less randomly, leading to unsatisfying performance, see this previous post). There is no support for the DDR4 memory, it is handled as ddr3. The eMMC is handled as HS-200 instead of HS-400 (so less speed, see FreeBSD post and it is far from stellar anyway). The SPI memory seems to be half-buggy, half-slow (see lkml). The U-boot is still relying on an older version (from 2017) because of difficulties in making it work with the current mainline (see this post). There are some reports of problems with using the PCIe (see this thread ). Half of the time, the board does not reboot but gets stuck when shutting down.
I am wondering if somebody at Pine64 works with the community to help fix these problems... (this is not supposed to be mean, but a genuine question: is the community left by to fight by itself or is there some support from Pine64).
Mathias
