Issues with NPU Performance across different Rock 5B Board Variants (might be os related)

#1

Hello everyone,

I am experiencing some issues with various Rock 5B boards and would appreciate your assistance. I have tested several boards using DietPi, and I have observed the following differences:

Tested Boards:

• Rock5B+ with 32GB LPDDR5 RAM
• Rock5B Blue Edition with 32GB RAM
• Rock5B Preorder Version with 16GB RAM
• NanoPim6 with 32GB LPDDR5 (for reference only)

Installation and Testing:

I followed the RLLM installation guide provided here:
https://docs.radxa.com/en/rock5/rock5b/app-development/rkllm_deepseek_r1

On the Rock5B Blue Edition and Rock5B Preorder Version , I executed the “rssetup -> sysupdate” procedure. Unfortunately, this process removed the Ethernet driver from the kernel (via apt autoremove) and did not update the RKNN drivers as expected.

Issue Description:

Under DietPi (Rock5B Preorder Version and NanoPim6, (Rock5B Blue Edition did not work with dietpi :confused: ), I noticed that only a single rknn server process appears in htop, and the NPU load is significantly lower than expected. For example, when using Radxa OS on the Rock5B+ board, deepseek 1.5b achieved approximately 14.93 tokens/s, whereas the other boards only reached around 7 tokens/s.

Additional Concern:

I would also appreciate it if the rssetup sysupdate process on Radxa OS did not remove the Ethernet driver on both the Rock 5B and Rock5B Blue Edition. For reference, I have been using the latest version (as of 02.03.2025), specifically the rock-5b_bookworm_kde_b5 build.

Any hints or suggestions to resolve these issues would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for the great Radxa products, as you can see I am a big fan of Radxa.
Thank you for your time and assistance.

Best regards,
Matthias

#2

This will keep your driver from being removed.

$ sudo apt-mark hold r8125-dkms radxa-system-config-r8125-dkms
2 Likes
#3

Sorry only the rock 5b+ has updated the kernel version number in radxa apt ( to update the npu driver), also our updater shouldn’t run apt autoremove, if you are experiencing problems with the network driver not loading please try deleting the /etc/modprobe.d/r8125-dkms.conf file and reboot after running sudo update-initramfs -u -k all.

#4

You might need to test this on the slower boards:

 # echo performance > /sys/devices/platform/dmc/devfreq/dmc/governor

Indeed, I noticed on my two boards (rock5b and rock5itx) that the default governor for the DRAM controller isn’t very responsive to workloads and tends to keep the RAM at low frequency even under moderate loads. For example, you can fill the 4 small cores or a single big one and still run at low frequency. This was also greatly discussed in the debug party invitation thread two years ago or so.

#5

Many thanks for the helpful answers.
I have set the CPU Governor to Performance under Dietpi-Config - performance. This could increase the token speed to about 15 tokens/s (same speed as the Rock 5 B+) I don’t think it’s really a hardware problem though. The debug party was a long time ago and the device is not a pre-production device but simply a Rock5B that I pre-ordered. The same problem occurs on the Nano Pi M6 which is much newer and LPDDR5 and on the Mid Gen Refresh the Rock5B Blue edition 32GB. I have the impression the error is Diet Pi related. Maybe Radxa can comment on this. With the stock Rom on the Rock5+ the problem is not present.