Reply To: Unzipping Performance

[deleted]

You’re saying that the CPU is not capable of 6G SATA, but you’re testing using a Linux command-line utility, not a test written for the CPU. If you’re saying that hardware is buggy, then please make a hardware test, not a software test.

You mention that the CPU is not able to run at 1.2GHz. Is this a problem with the CPU or is it actually a software problem ? -Eg. is it a problem with u-boot not being written correctly ?
-Anyway, CPU-speed does *not* matter at all. The CPU should *not* do any SATA transactions using CPU-instructions, the DMA should be used for that and that is independent of the instruction execution. If the software (eg. the driver) does not use the right hardware, that’s a software problem, not a hardware problem.

If you find that there is really a problem with the CPU, then you should notify Marvell that it can not satisfy the advertised capabilities. Marvell are experts when it comes to making high-speed SATA and network interfaces (the EspressoBIN does not wire the network interfaces optimally, though, it’s a hardware problem – yes – a board layout hardware problem, but that’s not Marvell’s fault, it’s due to USB3 was chosen over fast network).

My EspressoBIN reports 952 MB/sec on SATA when reading using ‘dd’.
-I know that this is not possible due to that the hard limit of SATA3 is 572.2 MB/sec – without counting the SATA protocol’s command overhead, so it must be Linux playing tricks on me (cache, asynchronous writing, etc).

If USB is USB, then you’d just need to go purchase a Lamobo-R1 (like I did), it has SATA via USB2. Needless to say, I do not use that board at all; some day I may set it up for doing some compile-tests, but that’s all I’ll ever use it for.
I’d still say that USB is not USB. There are several versions and speeds (too many if you ask me, plus USB speed is not what’s advertised; many people still believe in the that religion, though).

As for 32-bit access, I have been running 32-bit applications since I opened my EspressoBIN box.

Here’s the full recipe:

sudo bash
apt-get install software-properties-common
add-apt-repository universe
add-apt-repository multiverse
apt-get update
dpkg --add-architecture armhf
dpkg --print-foreign-architectures
apt-get autoclean
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get -u dist-upgrade
apt-get install libc6:armhf
dpkg --configure -a
apt-get -f install
exit

-I’ve encountered no problems at all; you can even run chrome as a 32-bit application if you wish to do something crazy. 😉

As for the too bright LEDs, I agree, which is why I’ve desoldered R48 on both of my boards. I have no issues with heat after that.

If 5V USB powering doesn’t work for you, try getting a power supply of better quality.
Switch-mode power supplies tend to deliver way below the advertised current.
I have a fairly solid 12V/3.8A PSU on my board, which has no problem powering my USB3 devices.

mPCIe spurious problem: Again, that’s a software problem.
Have you tried Armbian ? -It should work with a few Mini-PCIe cards (eg. those that are supported by drivers for them, including an extra SATA card and some WiFi cards).

USB3 “brokenness” – again, is this a problem with the hardware, or is it a driver problem ? If it’s a driver problem, then it’s the software that is to blame. Nobody can expect drivers to work out-of-the-box on a new system that the driver was never written for.
-Imagine that someone made a new USB device for EspressoBIN only. It works perfectly on this platform. Now you want to use that USB-device on a PC with an Intel-based CPU. Do you think you can just build the driver and go ? -You might expect that, but I can tell you, you’d be in for a surprise; build problems, missing hardware definitions, missing symbols, missing libraries, timing problems, race conditions, etc. – the list is very discouraging and the work can be *very* hard.

You can’t expect that all software written for Intel will just work on ARM/PowerPC/M68xxx/Z80/6502/whatever. Hardware differs. You have to accept that.
You’ll also have to learn that the tests you’re doing personally might be indicating something, but they can be wrong; they can be far off, because you did not think of all possible scenarios.

I get it, things can be frustrating if they don’t just work the way you expect them to.
If someone answers “impossible” to one of your questions, do not believe them.
“Impossible” is such an abused word, and way too many people use this (for them) way-too-big-word way too much.
If you can imagine something in your mind, it’s usually possible to realize it in reality.

Most of the time things are not impossible; it’s just necessary to find the path to get them working. -Otherwise I would not be running nginx, I wouldn’t have my own server, I wouldn’t have been able to compile a cross-GCC for a PowerPC host with ARMv7-M based target (this is way more complicated than you may think, it took me more than 3 years to get everything right – and no, none of the available resources on the internet could be used). You may need to get your hands dirty and contribute to drivers, especially for devices that are a little rare.