LAN/NIC problem

[tllim]

Any inference that the onboard GbE would be worse that what I'm getting on GbE over USB I'd imagine have to be incorrect, so while I understand I won't get *full* typical GbE speeds once the onboard port is working, I am looking forward to the significant boost over Fast Ethernet. It's the whole reason I was a backer of this project.

Why shouldn't you get 'full' typical GbE speeds? With longsleep's original Xenial image or Armbian and without any tuning you get already above 900 MBits/sec using synthetic CPU bound benchmarks (but unfortunately you can forget about those numbers when using most 'featured' OS images from pine64.pro or the wiki since they use wrong settings). When tuning for more throughput (which is not always desirable, sometimes you want to tune for lower latency) you will reach the typical 940 Mbits/sec barrier.

On the other hand USB throughput is rather limited, with good settings and BSP kernel you might get 35 MB/s, with mainline kernel and UASP capable disk enclosures you might get close to 40 MB/s. I already prepared a test with RAID-0 and two rather fast SSDs to demonstrate that with modern filesystems (btrfs on Linux and ZFS on FreeBSD) we're able to push the envelope and max out onboard Gigabit Ethernet on the Pine64+ in NAS mode. Jared McNeill who did the FreeBSD port for Pine64 discovered that we can turn the upper USB port normally being an USB OTG port into a full USB host port using an own USB PHY. Linux mainline kernel guys (in this case a girl  ) will implement exactly that too.

So when using modern filesystems with transparent file compression (a reasonable setting on Pine64+ since there's enough CPU horsepower available to trade in some CPU cycles for smaller filesizes and also higher IO throughput at the same time!) I'm pretty confident we'll be able to use Pine64+ as NAS with client-server performance close to or even exceeding 80 MB/s (through the network, including disk access).

Only problem: TL Lim sent 4 Pine64+ dev samples to me back in Jan/Feb, 2 arrived. The first is now at Mikhail's place (that's the guy who did Armbian porting to Pine64 and he's also responsible that we're at kernel version 3.10.102 now and not still at 3.10.65 -- think about countless bugs and security flaws that have been fixed), the second one at @androsch (that's the guy responsible for us finally making some progress identifying the GbE issue). So while both boards serve pretty well I've nothing to play with now. I hope @androsch forwards my request to TL Lim to send another dev sample(s) to provide some nice NAS benchmark numbers.

Given we're able to use both USB ports as true host ports and given the low price Pine64+ is a real bargain for low-end NAS use cases, virtualization (it's ARMv8!), clustering, whatever 

@androsh already contact me and three Pine A64+ 2GB board will ship out to you on Sunday after Shipping Facility back from the 3 days China holidays.