Operating the H3 in a reliable way (sane clockspeeds)

cramo123

bronco, your script works very nice

Here my small real-time temperature monitor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fDeDhI1n2c

I will show later my heat sink

bronco

cramo123 replied at 2015-12-9 12:44
bronco, your script works very nice

Here my small real-time temperature monitor:

Thx for the feedback -- good to hear that the script works. But the 'magic' happens somewhere else: Repairing the moronic overvolted dvfs table Xunlong delivered that is used unfortunately also by loboris in his OS images.

If you repair the dvfs table (this is all the script does) then you won't need a heatsink at all: http://linux-sunxi.org/User_talk:Tkaiser#Tests_without_a_heatsink

It's just the crazy overvolting (that's only needed to advertise the H3 based Orange Pi falsely as "being able to run up to 1.6Ghz") that's responsible for the heat problems Orange Pi users believe they have to suffer from.

bronco

BTW: Now that linux-sunxi devs start to support the H3 a fex file to be used with the 3.4.39 kernel we currently have to use will soon appear here:

    https://github.com/linux-sunxi/s ... e/master/sys_config

Of course the insane overvolting/overclocking will be disabled and heat problems will be resolved. The voltages at different operating points are higher than the ones I found to be useful so there's a bit more safety headroom by dropping mine and choosing the linux-sunxi ones). Also improvements regarding the 2 LEDs are included. For details please refer to:

    https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ ... It3GsA/2KDRe_8IAQAJ

I hope that providers of OS images like @loboris will adopt these settings soon to stop frying your devices. Of course specialities for OPi 2/plus have to be adjusted but cpufreq/dvfs/led stuff can be taken from https://github.com/linux-sunxi/s ... ng_orange_pi_pc.fex when available.

hojnikb

Yeah, i hope so too. Loboris image is great but those settings are crazy.

Hopefully new images will be made including those fixes and also all the great goodies that happend lately (gpu drivers, video decoding accelaration)

john0815

hojnikb replied at 2015-12-9 20:21
Yeah, i hope so too. Loboris image is great but those settings are crazy.

Hopefully new images will ...

I hope also that loboris make us a Kernel update, that includes this features.
Thanks for your hard work

zgoda

Thank you bronco, great news.

I already have few other boards with other Allwinner chips (A20, A31s) and the requirement for heatsink on H3 seemed insane for me.

bronco

Today I made a few comparisons with my 2nd OPi PC (without heatsink):

These are the settings I found safe (on the left) compared to the linux-sunxi ones that use higher voltages (safety headroom):



When increasing the clockspeeds the H3 was idle, while decreasing 4 threads cpuburn-a7 were running. Without a heatsink throttling occures at 1.2 GHz. That's fine.

I adjusted my RPi-Monitor setup to be able to monitor the 'cooling state' also and adjusted the thermal throttling values the new linux-sunxi dvfs table contains. On the left I increased the thermal values by 5°C and on the right the new defaults. I used "sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run --num-threads=4" to measure integer performance. The first time starting with an idle H3, the second time I let both stress and cpuburn-a7 run for 5 minutes with 4 threads each and then let sysbench measure again so that throttling might influence the results:



With the increased thermal tresholds CPU temp is allowed to get close to 85°C while performance remained the same (158 vs. 159 seconds). With the new defaults throttling occured a bit more often and the maximum performance decreased by ~5.5%. Please keep in mind that these are settings without heatsink and without fan. Just the Orange Pi without enclosure at 23°C ambient temperature. In case you attach a heatsink you won't suffer from thermal throttling at all. And all the overheating is gone.

zgoda

My OPi PC is running DietPi. With original dvfs it was idling at 43*C and I considered it sane. Yet I decided to give a try to bronco's settings. With new dvfs CPU is idling at 33-35*C. Definitely worth trying.

palloy

Fascinating reading this thread, thanks for working on this.

I got my OPi-PC a couple of days before Christmas, (free postage from China with AliExpress), as I sweltered in the tropics with ambient 34*C and 90% humidity.  I was still hunting for the path to the temperatures when I looked at syslog, and saw it was reporting throttling at 75, when the idle was 73 !  I junked the case and it came down to 60, hung it on edge in the air - 57.  Blowing on it got it down to 54.  I ordered a heatsink.

It is now working as a low-volume web server, headless.
It needs x2go/stable built, and kernel modules to support LUKS encryption.

What I need explaining is: what is script.bin ?  I mean is the source available?  What reads it and integrates it into Lubuntu?  Why isn't it in clear text, and loaded into filestore, where it could be changed with a text editor before being used?  Probably all stupid questions when you already have the answers.

Atech

you first need to convert "script.bin" to its fex version (using utilities like "BINTOFEX" & "FEXTOBIN" from " http://linux-sunxi.org ") ...  script.fex can then be opened in a word editor like notepad where you can change the settings ...
regarding your question "what is script.bin" .. just think of it as a configuration file which the Allwinner SOC`s bootloader use to initialise the SOCs parameters at boot time ..
for more on script.bin/script.fex file you can visit  " http://linux-sunxi.org/Fex_Guide "  ...