Armbian 22.11 Released With RISC-V 64-bit UEFI Build Support, New Arm Boards

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Armbian 22.11 Released With RISC-V 64-bit UEFI Build Support, New Arm Boards

Armbian 22.11 is now available as the Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux distribution popular with ARM development boards and supporting a wide range of hardware from different vendors...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Armbian-22.11-Released

[Draget]

They have such a wonderful approach on trying to enable each feature on each board while having a vanilla, optimized debian/ubuntu base. I am so very grateful for all the individuals who participate in this project. Love it!

[coder]

They have such a wonderful approach on trying to enable each feature on each board while having a vanilla, optimized debian/ubuntu base. I am so very grateful for all the individuals who participate in this project. Love it!

I have 3 big questions about it (not addressed in the FAQ):

1. How much focus do they place on support for HW acceleration?
2. Do they include proprietary drivers, or only in-tree ones?
3. On SoCs with >= ARMv8.2-A cores (e.g. A55/A75 or higher), do they enable atomics?

# 3 is newly relevant to the emerging set of RK3588-based boards out there, which have A55+A76 cores. I'm not aware of any with A75 cores, as yet.

[ayumu]

As we are now weeks rather than months away from large batches of VisionFive2 reaching developers and power users, I'm excited to see the ecosystem is getting ready for RISC-V.

Eagerly awaiting the first reviews.

[mangeek]

Very cool. I think a fun benchmark set would be between Armbian 2022.11, Ubuntu 22.10, Debian 11, and RaspiOS on a Raspberry 4 (or 400). I always wondered if any of these 'left some performance on the table'.

[archsway]

I have 3 big questions about it (not addressed in the FAQ):

1. How much focus do they place on support for HW acceleration?
2. Do they include proprietary drivers, or only in-tree ones?
3. On SoCs with >= ARMv8.2-A cores (e.g. A55/A75 or higher), do they enable atomics?

# 3 is newly relevant to the emerging set of RK3588-based boards out there, which have A55+A76 cores. I'm not aware of any with A75 cores, as yet.

Outline atomics seem to be enabled, so the LSE atomic instructions are getting used. However, it seems to me that at least for the uncontended case, the new atomic instructions are slower than the old load/store exclusive instructions on A76. I haven't done very scientific measuring though, perhaps it isn't actually slower.

[coder]

Very cool. I think a fun benchmark set would be between Armbian 2022.11, Ubuntu 22.10, Debian 11, and RaspiOS on a Raspberry 4 (or 400). I always wondered if any of these 'left some performance on the table'.

I'm really not sure there's much to the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS that's not just Debian 11. The repos are mostly Debian 11, suggesting nearly all of the userspace packages will be the same. Moreover, I doubt you could boot a stock Debian 11 kernel on it, even if you tried.

[coder]

it seems to me that at least for the uncontended case, the new atomic instructions are slower than the old load/store exclusive instructions on A76.

Actually, check out the single-threaded case, in these benchmarks:

https://cpufun.substack.com/p/atomics-in-aarch64

That should give you the uncontended performance. You might need to zoom in, to see it, but both the Thunder X2 and A64FX have higher n=1 performance with the ARMv8.1-A atomics.

Now, what's interesting is that the Thunder X2 performs worse than the A64FX in ARMv8.0-A mode, except for n <= 4. That crossover makes the plot slightly confusing. Because of that, he re-plotted it without n=1.

Oddly, on Thunder X2, v8.0 does perform better than v8.1, in n=2, and it has a slight edge at n=3.

[IanW]

Very cool. I think a fun benchmark set would be between Armbian 2022.11, Ubuntu 22.10, Debian 11, and RaspiOS on a Raspberry 4 (or 400). I always wondered if any of these 'left some performance on the table'.

The big trick with doing such a test would be to first find a Raspberry Pi 4.
I've been trying to buy another one for months!

[coder]

The big trick with doing such a test would be to first find a Raspberry Pi 4.
I've been trying to buy another one for months!

If you're willing to consider alternatives, you can find a list of the Armbian-supported devices, here:

https://www.armbian.com/download/?de...port=Supported

I like ODROID devices, myself. I have the N2+, although I'm currently running Ubuntu on it. Never tried Armbian... yet.

The Rock 5 is one of the newest and most powerful. There are other RK3588-based boards coming to market, but I don't see any of them listed as Armbian-supported.