Cubox-i 4x4 RAM [was Re: Performance of armhf boards]
[Ooops, the last one got away from me before it was finished!]
On Apr 20, 2016, at 10:26 PM, Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> wrote:
> This appears to be a thread forked from a reproducible-builds
> discussion. :)
Yeah… sorry for hijacking the thread… Please forgive my curiosity (:
>
> On 2016-04-20, Rick Thomas wrote:
>> On Sun, Apr 17, 2016, at 06:36 PM, Steven Chamberlain wrote:
>>> I was wondering what is the performance of various armhf boards, for
>>> package building.
>> ...
>>> cbxi4a-armhf-rb.debian.net 1996 2365 # 4x,4G;
>>> Cubox-i4x4
>>> cbxi4pro0-armhf-rb.debian.net 1973 2743 # 4x,2G;
>>> CuBox-i4Pro
>> ...
>>> I don't know whether to believe these figures yet!
>>>
>>> * cbxi4a/b seem no faster than cbxi4pro0 despite twice the RAM?
>
>> One personal experience that may be relevant:
>>
>> I ordered a Cubox-i4x4 from NewEgg a few months ago. When it arrived it
>> was clearly marked as a 4x4, and in the original shrink-wrap, But it
>> only had 2GB of RAM. I notified NewEgg and they tested one of the other
>> one's of that batch they had in stock. Surprise! It also had only 2GB
>> RAM... They gave me a rebate of the difference in price between the
>> i4-Pro and the 4x4 and we considered the matter closed.
>
> Well, you need to either use the vendor u-boot with support for more
> ram, or patch mainline u-boot to use more. Haven't taken the time to
> write a patch that works with all the various ram configurations, so
> haven't pushed anything mainline.
>
> The cubox-i4x4 I am running with a one or two line patched mainline
> u-boot but effectively are limited to 3.8GB, but that's still
> significantly more than 2GB.
>
>
> live well,
> vagrant
Let me see if I’ve got this right…
Are you saying that the amount of RAM seen by Debian Linux is determined by something in u-boot?
Here’s what I see on the machine in question running Debian:
> rbthomas@half:~$ uname -a
> Linux half 3.16.0-4-armmp #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt25-2 (2016-04-08) armv7l GNU/Linux
and
> U-Boot 2014.10+dfsg1-5 (Apr 07 2015 - 22:16:43)
I get
> rbthomas@half:~$ cat /proc/meminfo
> MemTotal: 2069780 kB
But if I were using your patched mainline u-boot, I would get a different (larger) number (almost, but not quite, the full 4.0GiB)?
Very interesting!
I seem to remember that I got roughly the same number (lightly less than 2.0 GiB) when I booted the manufacturer supplied u-boot and Ubuntu kernel from the uSD-card that came with it.
Enjoy!
Rick
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