[tkaiser]

> I’m somewhat reluctant to overclock the board, as it is the only one I have currently 😉

Understandable. At the moment both cpufreq scaling and THS (thermal readouts) seem not to work. Since the SoC seems to be approx. 11x12mm in size I already ordered some 1.5mm thick copper shims to connect SoC and Topaz Switch to the enclosure bottom of an aluminium box (so the case will be used for heat dissipation).

As far as I understood SoC and Topaz switch are interconnected with 2.5GbE, what about using two GbE clients, starting
taskset -c 0 iperf3 -s -p 5021 and taskset -c 1 iperf3 -s -p 5022 on the Espressobin and then testing with each client against port 5021 and 5022 respectively?

[tkaiser]

In case you don’t use htop already better install it since it displays individual core utilization. By default regardless of IRQ affinity all IRQs are processed by cpu0 so without manually tweaking IRQ affinity you get pretty fast bottlenecked by CPU: https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/scripts/armhwinfo#L217

On a related note: How fast do CPU cores clock in your installation: /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq

Cpufreq scaling should scale between 800 and 1200 MHz but at least the Armbian dev currently working on Espressobin reports the CPU cores being limited to 800 MHz for whatever reasons (by examining the .dtsi I wondered that OPP for dvfs/cpufreq scaling are currently missing but I didn’t had a closer look).

The older Armada 38x SoCs (Cortex-A9 and clocking up to 1.6GHz) are known to saturate a 2.5GbE link so there’s still some hope 😉

[tkaiser]

> The PCIe slot on Espressobin is for WIFI and BT usage only. It doesn’t support mSATA.

But fortunately we can add 2 or 4 port SATA mPCIe cards to get 3 or even 5 SATA ports in total 🙂

2 ports with ASM1062/ASM1061 https://forum.armbian.com/index.php?/topic/4089-espressobin-support-development-efforts/&do=findComment&comment=30116 or even 4 ports https://forum.armbian.com/index.php?/topic/3953-preview-generate-omv-images-for-sbc-with-armbian/&do=findComment&comment=29574

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