[Ooops, the last one got away from me before it was finished!] On Apr 20, 2016, at 10:26 PM, Vagrant Cascadian <[email protected]> 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
